Hilbert–Samuel function Created 2026-09-28 Updated 2026-10-06
For an ideal of definition of a Noetherian local ring and a finitely generated module , the Hilbert–Samuel function is
For sufficiently large , it equals the Hilbert-Samuel polynomial.
For a Noetherian local ring , let . Its eventual Hilbert-Samuel polynomial has degree , equivalently the pole order at of the Hilbert series of . This is the local length-growth invariant, not the embedding dimension. The prime-chain lower bound for local length proves ; the full local dimension theorem gives equality.
If has Krull dimension , the coefficient of in its Hilbert-Samuel polynomial is . The positive integer is the Hilbert–Samuel multiplicity of with respect to .
Use the following finite-length version of the Hilbert-Serre theorem. Let be a graded algebra generated over an Artinian ring by finitely many homogeneous elements of positive degrees . For a finitely generated nonnegatively graded -module , define its Poincare series of a graded module by
Every component has finite length, and the theorem says
For a module whose grading is merely bounded below, the same statement holds with a Laurent-polynomial numerator. When the generators all have degree one, the denominator is .
Here is an induction proof. An Artinian ring is Noetherian by question 1, so the Hilbert basis theorem makes Noetherian. If there are no positive-degree generators, and a finite homogeneous generating set for occupies only finitely many degrees. Each component is a finite module over the Artinian ring , hence has finite length of a module, and is a polynomial.
For , put , , and . Both are finitely generated graded modules annihilated by , hence modules over , which is generated by the first homogeneous elements. Their multiplication exact sequence is
Here . Additivity of length degree by degree gives
This is the Hilbert series multiplication exact sequence. By induction, the right-hand side has denominator . Division by completes the proof of the Hilbert-Serre theorem. The finite-component and finite-generation claims also follow from the finite set of positive-degree algebra and module generators; no analytic convergence of a series is involved.
For the local invariant, use the usual Noetherian local ring hypothesis of Hilbert–Samuel growth dimension. Locality alone does not guarantee finite lengths or polynomial growth; the printed question leaves this finiteness assumption implicit. For instance, in the localization at a prime ideal of the polynomial ring at , the vector space has the infinitely many independent classes of the variables, so its length is not finite. Write and . Its associated graded ring
is generated over in degree one, because is finitely generated. Thus its Hilbert series is rational with a denominator that is a power of . After cancelling factors, write
Define , the pole order at , with when is a polynomial.
Equivalently, the Hilbert–Samuel function
has generating series and eventually agrees with a polynomial of degree . Indeed, coefficients of are , and multiplication by leaves leading term . Consequently is the degree of the cumulative Hilbert-Samuel polynomial, rather than the degree of the individual graded-component function; the latter has degree when . This pole/growth invariant also equals Krull dimension by the local dimension theorem, although that theorem is not required to define it here.
For an example, take . Its associated graded ring is with the ordinary degree grading: degree has the monomials as a basis. Therefore
The length formula also follows directly by counting monomials of total degree at most in .
For an -primary ideal in a Noetherian local ring, the function
agrees for all sufficiently large with a polynomial in . This is the Hilbert-Samuel polynomial, also called here the characteristic polynomial of . Using instead merely shifts its variable.