Abstract Given $$n$$ general points $$p_1, p_2, \ldots , p_n \in{\mathbb{P}}^r$$ it is natural to ask whether there is a curve of given degree $$d$$ and genus $$g$$ passing through them; by counting dimensions a natural conjecture is that such a curve exists if and only if $$\begin{equation*}n \leq \left\lfloor \frac{(r + 1)d - (r - 3)(g - 1)}{r - 1}\right\rfloor.\end{equation*}$$The case of curves with nonspecial hyperplane section was recently studied in [2], where the above conjecture was shown to hold with exactly three exceptions. In this paper, we prove a “bounded-error analog” for special linear series on general curves; more precisely we show that existence of such a curve subject to the stronger inequality $$\begin{equation*}n \leq \left\lfloor \frac{(r + 1)d - (r - 3)(g - 1)}{r - 1}\right\rfloor - 3.\end{equation*}$$Note that the $-3$ cannot be replaced with $-2$ without introducing exceptions (as a canonical curve in $${\mathbb{P}}^3$$ can only pass through nine general points, while a naive dimension count predicts twelve). We also use the same technique to prove that the twist of the normal bundle $$N_C(-1)$$ satisfies interpolation for curves whose degree is sufficiently large relative to their genus, and deduce from this that the number of general points contained in the hyperplane section of a general curve is at least $$\begin{equation*}\min\left(d, \frac{(r - 1)^2 d - (r - 2)^2 g - (2r^2 - 5r + 12)}{(r - 2)^2}\right).\end{equation*}$$ As explained in [7], these results play a key role in the author’s proof of the maximal rank conjecture [9].
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This content will become publicly available on January 17, 2026
The Clairvoyant Maître d'
In this paper we study a variant of the Malicious Maître d' problem. This problem, attributed to computer scientist Rob Pike in Peter Winkler's book Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection, involves seating diners around a circular table with napkins placed between each pair of adjacent settings. The goal of the maître d' is to seat the diners in a way that maximizes the number of diners who arrive at the table to find the napkins on both the left and right of their place already taken by their neighbors. Previous work described a seating algorithm in which the maître d' expects to force about 18\% of the diners to be napkinless. In this paper, we show that if the maître d' learns each diner's preference for the right or left napkin before they are placed at the table, this expectation jumps to nearly $1/3$ (and converges to $1/3$ as the table size gets large). Moreover, our strategy is optimal for every sequence of diners' preferences.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2054436
- PAR ID:
- 10594163
- Publisher / Repository:
- The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics
- Volume:
- 32
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1077-8926
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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