Goppa Duality for Surfaces

Abstract

Gale duality is an involution of point configurations in projective spaces. Goppa duality extends this concept to a duality between linear series on a Gorenstein curve passing through prescribed points. We generalize this classical result to surfaces, establishing a duality for linear series on surfaces realizing prescribed points as a complete intersection of two divisors. We present several applications, including existence and uniqueness results for Veronese surfaces satisfying conditions to pass through given points or curves. As a key example, we give an alternative proof of Coble's result on the existence of four Veronese surfaces passing through nine general points in projective 5-space.