Durfee's conjecture on the signature of smoothings of surface singularities

Abstract: In 1978 Durfee conjectured various inequalities between the signature and the geometric genus of a normal surface singularity. Since then a few counter examples have been found and positive results established in some special cases. We prove a strong' Durfee--type inequality for any smoothing of a Gorenstein singularity, provided that the intersection form the resolution is unimodular, and the conjecturedweak' inequality for all hypersurface singularities and for sufficiently large multiplicity strict complete intersections. The proofs establish general inequalities valid for any normal surface singularity.