Chow-Lam Recovery

Abstract

We study the conditions under which a subvariety of the Grassmannian may be recovered from certain of its linear projections. In the special case that our Grassmannian is projective space, this is equivalent to asking when a variety can be recovered from its Chow form; the answer is "always" by work of Chow in 1937. In the general Grassmannian setting, the analogous question is when a variety can be recovered from its Chow-Lam form. We give both necessary conditions for recovery and families of examples where, in contrast with the projective case, recovery is not possible.