Abstract. Associated to an n-dimensional integral convex polytope P is a toric variety X and divisor D, such that the integral points of P represent H 0 (O X (D)). We study the free resolution of the homogeneous coordinate ring m∈Z H 0 (mD) as a module over Sym(H 0 (O X (D))). It turns out that a simple application of Green's theorem yields good bounds for the linear syzygies of a projective toric surface. In particular, for a planar polytope, D satisfies Green's condition Np if ∂P contains at least p + 3 lattice points.
Green's theorem and hyperplane sectionsFor a curve C of genus g, a divisor D of degree d ≥ 2g+1 is very ample, so gives an embedding of C into projective space. In fact, when d ≥ 2g+1, work of Castelnuovo, Mattuck and Mumford shows that the embedding is projectively normal, which means that, results of Fujita and St. Donat show that the homogeneous ideal of I C is generated by quadrics. Let F • be a minimal free resolution of R over S. A very ample divisor is said to satisfy property N p if F 0 = S and F q S(−q − 1) for all q ∈ {1, . . . , p}. Thus, N 0 means projectively normal, N 1 means that the homogeneous ideal is generated by quadrics, N 2 means that the minimal syzygies on the quadrics are linear, and so on. In [7], Green used Koszul cohomology to give a beautiful generalization of the classical results above:In this brief note, we investigate the N p property for toric varieties. For any divisor D and variety X such that R is arithmetically Cohen-Macaulay, it is natural to slice with hyperplanes until X has been reduced to a curve, and then apply Green's theorem. Results of Hochster [8] show that projectively normal toric varieties are always arithmetically Cohen-Macaulay. So it makes sense to apply the technique in this setting. In [4], Ewald and Wessels prove that if D is an ample divisor on a toric variety of dimension n, then (n − 1)D is very ample and satisfies N 0 . Bruns, Gubeladze and Trung [2] give another proof and also show that nD satisfies property N 1 . While it is often difficult to determine if a given divisor satisfies N 0 , for a lattice polygon P and corresponding divisor on a toric surface, the property N 0 holds "for free".