Equations and syzygies of the first secant variety to a smooth curve

Abstract

We show that if C is a linearly normal smooth curve embedded by a line bundle of degree at least 2g+3+p then the secant variety to the curve satisfies N_{3,p}.

9 pages. This is an extraction of the case of smooth curves from a previous preprint of the author (arXiv:0809.4463). We hope that the main ideas will be made clearer by specializing to this case