Plane curves of minimal degree with prescribed singularities

We prove that there exists a>0 such that for any integer d>2 and any topological types S_1,...,S_n of plane curve singularities, satisfying $\mu(S_1)+...+\mu(S_n) \leq ad^2$, there exists a reduced irreducible plane curve of degree d with exactly n singular points of types S_1,...,S_n, respectively. This estimate is optimal with respect to the exponent of d. In particular, we prove that for any topological type S there exists an irreducible polynomial of degree $d \leq 14\sqrt{\mu(S)}$ having a singular point of type S.Comment: 33 pages, LaTeX 2e, corrected some typos, simplified proofs of Lemmas 3.1, 4.

Equianalytic and equisingular families of curves on surfaces

We consider flat families of reduced curves on a smooth surface S such that each member C has the same number of singularities of fixed singularity types and the corresponding (locally closed) subscheme H of the Hilbert scheme of S. We are mainly concerned with analytic resp. topological singularity types and give a sufficient condition for the smoothness of H (at C). Our results for S=P^2 seem to be quite sharp for families of cuves of small degree d.Comment: LaTeX v 2.0