Algebraic Geometry Seminar

The gonality of a smooth projective curve is the smallest degree of a map from the curve to the projective line. If a curve is embedded in projective space, it is natural to ask whether the gonality is related to the embedding. In my talk, I will discuss recent work with James Hotchkiss. Our main result is that, under mild degree hypotheses, the gonality of a general complete intersection curve in projective space is computed by projection from a codimension 2 linear space, and any minimal degree branched covering of P^1 arises in this way.