On Zariski's theorem in positive characteristic
In the current paper we show that the dimension of a family of irreducible reduced curves in a given ample linear system on a toric surface over an algebraically closed field is bounded from above by , where denotes a general curve in the family. This result generalizes a famous theorem of Zariski to the case of positive characteristic. We also explore new phenomena that occur in positive characteristic: We show that the equality does not imply the nodality of even if belongs to the...