The gonality theorem of Noether for hypersurfaces

Francesco Bastianelli, Renza Cortini, Pietro De Poi

Published 2011-02-22, updated 2011-07-15Version 2

It is well known since Noether that the gonality of a smooth plane curve of degree d>3 is d-1. Given a k-dimensional complex projective variety X, the most natural extension of gonality is probably the degree of irrationality, that is the minimum degree of a dominant rational map from X to $\mathbb{P}^k$. In this paper we are aimed at extending the assertion on plane curves to smooth hypersurfaces in $\mathbb{P}^n$ in terms of degree of irrationality. We prove that both surfaces in $\mathbb{P}^3$ and threefolds in $\mathbb{P}^4$ of sufficiently large degree d have degree of irrationality d-1, except for finitely many cases we classify, whose degree of irrationality is d-2. To this aim we use Mumford's technique of induced differentials and we shift the problem to study first order congruences of lines of $\mathbb{P}^n$. In particular, we also slightly improve the description of such congruences in $\mathbb{P}^4$ and we provide a bound on degree of irrationality of hypersurfaces of arbitrary dimension.