Let (R,m) be a Noetherian local ring and UR=Spec(R)−{m} be the punctured spectrum of R. Gabber conjectured that if R is a complete intersection of dimension three, then the abelian group Pic(UR) is torsion-free. In this note we prove Gabber’s statement for the hypersurface case. We also point out certain connections between Gabber’s conjecture, Van den Bergh’s notion of non-commutative crepant resolutions and some well-studied questions in homological algebra over local rings.

We introduce symmetrizing operators of the polynomial ring A[x] in the variable x over a ring A. When A is an algebra over a field k these operators are used to characterize the monic polynomials F(x) of degree n in A[x] such that A[otimes]kk[x](x)/(F(x)) is a free A-module of rank n. We use the characterization to determine the Hilbert scheme parameterizing subschemes of length n of k[x](x).

The purpose of this note is to present a somewhat unexpected relation between diophantine approximations and the geometric invariant theory. The link is given by Mumford's degree of contact. We show that destabilizing flags of Chow-unstable projective varieties provide systems of diophantine approximations which are better than those given by Schmidt's subspace theorem, and we give examples of these systems.

In this paper we obtain several new characterizations of modules having small cofinite irreducibles. One of these characterizations involves a metric topology defined on the submodule lattice.

Let R be a not necessarily commutative local ring, M a free R-module, and π ∈ GL(M) such that B(π) = im(π –1)is a subspace of M. Then π = σ1…σtρ, where σi are simple mappings of given types, ρ is a simple mapping, B(sgr;i) and B(ρ) are subspaces and t ≤ dim B(π).