The notion of Vasconcelos invariant, known in the literature as v-number, of a homogeneous ideal in a polynomial ring over a field was introduced in 2020 to study the asymptotic behavior of the minimum distance of projective Reed–Muller type codes. We initiate the study of this invariant for graded modules. Let R be a Noetherian $\mathbb {N}$-graded ring and M be a finitely generated graded R-module. The v-number $v(M)$ can be defined as the least possible degree of a homogeneous element x of M for which $(0:_Rx)$ is a prime ideal of R. For a homogeneous ideal I of R, we mainly prove that $v(I^nM)$ and $v(I^nM/I^{n+1}M)$ are eventually linear functions of n. In addition, if $(0:_M I)=0$, then $v(M/I^{n}M)$ is also eventually linear with the same leading coefficient as that of $v(I^nM/I^{n+1}M)$. These leading coefficients are described explicitly. The result on the linearity of $v(M/I^{n}M)$ considerably strengthens a recent result of Conca which was shown when R is a domain and $M=R$, and Ficarra–Sgroi where the polynomial case is treated.

The $a$ -invariant, the $F$ -pure threshold, and the diagonal $F$ -threshold are three important invariants of a graded $K$ -algebra. Hirose, Watanabe, and Yoshida have conjectured relations among these invariants for strongly $F$ -regular rings. In this article, we prove that these relations hold only assuming that the algebra is $F$ -pure. In addition, we present an interpretation of the $a$ -invariant for $F$ -pure Gorenstein graded $K$ -algebras in terms of regular sequences that preserve $F$ -purity. This result is in the spirit of Bertini theorems for projective varieties. Moreover, we show connections with projective dimension, Castelnuovo–Mumford regularity, and Serre’s condition $S_{k}$ . We also present analogous results and questions in characteristic zero.

The cover product of disjoint graphs $G$ and $H$ with fixed vertex covers $C\left( G \right)$ and $C\left( H \right)$ , is the graph $G\circledast H$ with vertex set $V\left( G \right)\cup V\left( H \right)$ and edge set

$$E\left( G \right)\,\cup \,E\left( H \right)\,\cup \,\left\{ \left\{ i,\,j \right\}\,:\,i\,\in \,C\left( G \right),\,j\,\in \,C\left( H \right) \right\}.$$

We describe the graded Betti numbers of $G\circledast H$ in terms of those of $G$ and $H$ . As applications we obtain: (i) For any positive integer k there exists a connected bipartite graph $G$ such that $\text{reg}\,R/I\left( G \right)\,=\,{{\mu }_{s}}\left( G \right)\,+\,k$ , where, $I\left( G \right)$ denotes the edge ideal of $G$ , $\text{reg}\,\text{R/I}\left( G \right)$ is the Castelnuovo–Mumford regularity of $\text{R/I}\left( G \right)$ and ${{\mu }_{s}}\left( G \right)$ is the induced or strong matching number of $G$ ; (ii)The graded Betti numbers of the complement of a tree depends only upon its number of vertices; (iii)The $h$ -vector of $R/I\left( G\circledast H \right)$ is described in terms of the $h$ -vectors of $\text{R/I}\left( G \right)$ and $R/I\left( H \right)$ . Furthermore, in a different direction, we give a recursive formula for the graded Betti numbers of chordal bipartite graphs.

Let $S$ be a polynomial ring over a field $K$ and let $I$ be a monomial ideal of $S$. We say that $I$ is MHC (that is, $I$ satisfies the maximal height condition for the associated primes of $I$) if there exists a prime ideal $\mathfrak{p}\in {\mathrm{Ass} }_{S} \hspace{0.167em} S/ I$ for which $\mathrm{ht} (\mathfrak{p})$ equals the number of indeterminates that appear in the minimal set of monomials generating $I$. Let $I= { \mathop{\bigcap }\nolimits}_{i= 1}^{k} {Q}_{i} $ be the irreducible decomposition of $I$ and let $m(I)= \max \{ \vert Q_{i}\vert - \mathrm{ht} ({Q}_{i} ): 1\leq i\leq k\} $, where $\vert {Q}_{i} \vert $ denotes the total degree of ${Q}_{i} $. Then it can be seen that when $I$ is primary, $\mathrm{reg} (S/ I)= m(I)$. In this paper we improve this result and show that whenever $I$ is MHC, then $\mathrm{reg} (S/ I)= m(I)$ provided $\vert {\mathrm{Ass} }_{S} \hspace{0.167em} S/ I\vert \leq 2$. We also prove that $m({I}^{n} )\leq n\max \{ \vert Q_{i}\vert : 1\leq i\leq ~k\} - \mathrm{ht} (I)$, for all $n\geq 1$. In addition we show that if $I$ is MHC and $w$ is an indeterminate which is not in the monomials generating $I$, then $\mathrm{reg} (S/ \mathop{(I+ {w}^{d} S)}\nolimits ^{n} )\leq \mathrm{reg} (S/ I)+ nd- 1$ for all $n\geq 1$ and $d$ large enough. Finally, we implement an algorithm for the computation of $m(I)$.

Let $K$ be a field of characteristic $p$ and let $G$ be a finite group of order divisible by $p$. The regularity conjecture states that the Castelnuovo–Mumford regularity of the cohomology ring $H^*(G,K)$ is always equal to 0. We prove that if the regularity conjecture holds for a finite group $H$, then it holds for the wreath product $H\wr\mathbb{Z}/p$. As a corollary, we prove the regularity conjecture for the symmetric groups $\varSigma_n$. The significance of this is that it is the first set of examples for which the regularity conjecture has been checked, where the difference between the Krull dimension and the depth of the cohomology ring is large. If this difference is at most 2, the regularity conjecture is already known to hold by previous work.

For more general wreath products, we have not managed to prove the regularity conjecture. Instead we prove a weaker statement: namely, that the dimensions of the cohomology groups are polynomial on residue classes (PORC) in the sense of Higman.

Using multigraded Castelnuovo–Mumford regularity, we study the equations defining a projective embedding of a variety $X$. Given globally generated line bundles $B_{1}, \dotsc, B_{\ell}$ on $X$ and $m_{1}, \dotsc, m_{\ell} \in \mathbb{N}$, consider the line bundle $L := B_{1}^{m_{1}} \otimes \dotsb \otimes B_{\ell}^{m_{\ell}}$. We give conditions on the $m_{i}$ which guarantee that the ideal of $X$ in $\mathbb{P}(H^{0}(X,L)^{*})$ is generated by quadrics and that the first $p$ syzygies are linear. This yields new results on the syzygies of toric varieties and the normality of polytopes.

The main result of this paper is that, over a non-commutative Koszul algebra, high truncations of finitely generated graded modules have linear free resolutions.