We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server as of 1 March 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.
One considers the behavior of the degree of a rational map under specialization of the coefficients of the defining linear system. The method rests on the classical idea of Kronecker as applied to the context of projective schemes and their specializations. For the theory to work one is led to develop the details of rational maps and their graphs when the ground ring of coefficients is a Noetherian integral domain.
