Effective de Rham Cohomology - The General Case

Abstract

Grothendieck has proved that each class in the de Rham cohomology of a smooth complex affine variety can be represented by a differential form with polynomial coefficients. After having proved a single exponential bound for the degrees of these forms in the case of a hypersurface, here we generalize this result to arbitrary codimension. More precisely, we show that the p-th de Rham cohomology of a smooth affine variety of dimension m and degree D can be represented by differential forms of degree (pD)^{O(pm)}. This result is relevant for the algorithmic computation of the cohomology, but is also motivated by questions in the theory of ordinary differential equations related to the infinitesimal Hilbert 16th problem.