Stillman's conjecture via generic initial ideals

TL;DR

This paper proves a finiteness property of generic initial ideals for polynomial ideals generated by fixed-degree polynomials, using recent advances in algebra and topology, with an algorithmic approach.

Contribution

It establishes that such ideals have finitely many generic initial ideals regardless of variables or field characteristic, combining algebraic and topological methods.

Findings

Finitely generated ideals in formal power series rings have finitely generated Gr"obner bases.

Ideals generated by fixed-degree polynomials have finitely many generic initial ideals.

An algorithm outputs all possible generic initial ideals and their coefficient strata.

Abstract

Using recent work by Erman-Sam-Snowden, we show that finitely generated ideals in the ring of bounded-degree formal power series in infinitely many variables have finitely generated Gr\"obner bases relative to the graded reverse lexicographic order. We then combine this result with the first author's work on topological Noetherianity of polynomial functors to give an algorithmic proof of the following statement: ideals in polynomial rings generated by a fixed number of homogeneous polynomials of fixed degrees only have a finite number of possible generic initial ideals, independently of the number of variables that they involve and independently of the characteristic of the ground field. Our algorithm outputs not only a finite list of possible generic initial ideals, but also finite descriptions of the corresponding strata in the space of coefficients.