Some thirty years ago Buchsbaum and Rim [1] extended the notion of multiplicity e(a1, …, an; E) for elements a1, …, an of a commutative ring R with identity and a Noetherian R-module E (≠0) with lengthR (E/[sum ]nt=1aiE) finite to give a multiplicity e((aij); E) associated with E and an m×n matrix (aij) over R satisfying a certain extended finiteness condition. One of their results states that for each of a set of m complexes depending on E, (aij) the Euler–Poincaré characteristic is a certain integer multiple of e((aij); E), at least when R is a local ring.

Some of these ideas were taken up in [4] where it is shown that when n[ges ]m−1, each of the complexes K((aij); E; t) with t∈ℤ introduced in [3] also have e((aij); E) as their Euler–Poincaré characteristic. With a slight change in viewpoint (aij) can be replaced by linear forms aj=[sum ]mi=1aijxi (j=1, …, n) of the graded polynomial ring R[x1, …, xm]; the complex K((aij); E; t) then becomes the component of degree t in a certain graded double complex

formula here

where K(a1, …, an; F) is the standard Koszul complex (see [4; section 2]). From this point of view the construction can be extended to allow the homogeneous polynomials a1, …, an to have any (possibly unequal) positive degrees [6]. The main aim of the present note is to extend similarly the results of [4] and to strengthen those results to give information on the vanishing of the multiplicity.