Projecting Syzygies of Curves

Abstract

We explore the concept of projections of syzygies and prove two new technical results; we firstly give a precise characterization of syzygy schemes in terms of their projections, secondly, we prove a converse to Aprodu's Projection Theorem. Applying these results, we prove that extremal syzygies of general curves of non-maximal gonality embedded by a linear system of sufficiently high degree arise from scrolls. Lastly, we prove Green's Conjecture for general covers of elliptic curves (of arbitrary degree) as well as proving a new result for curves of even genus and maximal gonality.

Final version, to appear in Algebraic Geometry