On Birational Maps and Jacobian Matrices

One is concerned with Cremona-like transformations, i.e., rational maps from ⁿ to ^m that are birational onto the image Y ^m and, moreover, the inverse map from Y to ⁿ lifts to ^m. We establish a handy criterion of birationality in terms of certain syzygies and ranks of appropriate matrices and, moreover, give an effective method to explicitly obtaining the inverse map. A handful of classes of Cremona and Cremona-like transformations follow as applications.