Fat points, partial intersections and Hamming distance

Abstract

We use two main techniques, namely, residuation and separators of points, to show that the Hilbert function of a certain fat point set supported on a grid complete intersection is the same as the Hilbert function of a reduced set of points called a partial intersection. As an application, we answer a question of Tohǎneanu and Van Tuyl which relates the minimum Hamming distance of a special linear code and the minimum socle degree of the associated fat point set.