We propose a conjectural list of Fano manifolds of Picard number $1$ with pseudoeffective normalised tangent bundles, which we prove in various situations by relating it to the complete divisibility conjecture of Francesco Russo and Fyodor L. Zak on varieties with small codegree. Furthermore, the pseudoeffective thresholds and, hence, the pseudoeffective cones of the projectivised tangent bundles of rational homogeneous spaces of Picard number $1$ are explicitly determined by studying the total dual variety of minimal rational tangents (VMRTs) and the geometry of stratified Mukai flops. As a by-product, we obtain sharp vanishing theorems on the global twisted symmetric holomorphic vector fields on rational homogeneous spaces of Picard number $1$.

We give bounds for the Betti numbers of projective algebraic varieties in terms of their classes (degrees of dual varieties of successive hyperplane sections). We also give bounds for classes in terms of ramification volumes (mixed ramification degrees), sectional genus and, eventually, in terms of dimension, codimension and degree. For varieties whose degree is large with respect to codimension, we give sharp bounds for the above invariants and classify the varieties on the boundary, thus obtaining a generalization of Castelnuovo’s theory for curves to varieties of higher dimension.

We study the product of a Fermat hypersurface $X_0^{p+1}+\dots+X_n^{p+1}=0 \subset \mathbf{P}^n$ with $n \ge 3$ and $\mathbf{P}^1$, embedded in $\mathbf{P}^{2n+1}$ by Segre embedding where $p>0$ is the characteristic of the base field. This smooth variety is nonreflexive and has Gauss map which is an embedding. This gives a negative answer to the following Kleiman–Piene question in any positive characteristic: does the separability of the Gauss map imply reflexivity? The only known smooth examples, which give a negative answer, are given by Kaji in characteristic 2.

Here we study the dimension δ(m, X) of the general fibers of the m-Gaussian map of a singular n-dimensional variety X ⊂ Pn. We show that for all integers a, b, c, d with n ≦ a < b ≦ c < d ≦ N − 1 and a + d = b + c we have δ (a, X) + δ(d, X) > δ(b, X) + δ(c, X). If δ(X, N − 1) is very large we give some classification results which extend to the singular case some results of Ein.