The number of reducible hypersurfaces in a pencil.
Let be a Gorenstein, -factorial, toric Fano variety. We prove two conjectures on the maximal Picard number of in terms of its dimension and its pseudo-index, and characterize the boundary cases. Equivalently, we determine the maximal number of vertices of a simplicial reflexive polytope.
We review a construction of Ellingsrud-Strømme relating instantons of charge n on the ordinary projective space and theta-characteristics on a plane curve of degree n with some extra-structure.
We describe the set of points over which a dominant polynomial map is not a local analytic covering. We show that this set is either empty or it is a uniruled hypersurface of degree bounded by .