UC Berkeley

In 1982-1983, E. Nochka proved a conjecture of Cartan on defects of holomorphic curves in P-n relative to a possibly degenerate set of hyperplanes. This was further explained by W. Chen in his 1987 thesis, and subsequently simplified by M. Ru and P.-M. Wong in 1991. The proof involved assigning weights to the hyperplanes. This paper provides further simplification of the proof of the construction of the weights, by bringing back the use of the convex hull in working with the "Nochka diagram." (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.