High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In mathematics, Serre's multiplicity conjectures, named after Jean-Pierre Serre, are certain purely algebraic problems, in commutative algebra, motivated by the needs of algebraic geometry. Since André Weil's initial rigorous definition of intersection numbers, around 1949, there had been a question of how to provide a more flexible and computable theory. If this idea were to work, however, certain classical relationships would presumably have to continue to hold. Serre singled out four important properties. These then became conjectures, challenging in the general case. (There are more general statements of these conjectures where R/P and R/Q are replaced by finitely generated modules: see Serre's Local Algebra for more details.)