Primary ideals and their differential equations

Abstract

An ideal in a polynomial ring encodes a system of linear partial differential equations with constant coefficients. Primary decomposition organizes the solutions to the PDE. This paper develops a novel structure theory for primary ideals in a polynomial ring. We characterize primary ideals in terms of PDE, punctual Hilbert schemes, relative Weyl algebras, and the join construction. Solving the PDE described by a primary ideal amounts to computing Noetherian operators in the sense of Ehrenpreis and Palamodov. We develop new algorithms for this task, and we present efficient implementations.

32 pages. To appear in Foundations of Computational Mathematics