On the n-th row of the graded Betti table of an n-dimensional toric variety

Abstract

We prove an explicit formula for the first non-zero entry in the n-th row of the graded Betti table of an n-dimensional projective toric variety associated to a normal polytope with at least one interior lattice point. This applies to Veronese embeddings of projective space where we prove a special case of a conjecture of Ein and Lazarsfeld. We also prove an explicit formula for the entire n-th row when the interior of the polytope is one-dimensional. All results are valid over an arbitrary field k.