Upper Bound on the Multiplicity of Rational and Du Bois Singularities

Abstract This paper resolves a question of Huneke and Watanabe by proving a sharp upper bound for the multiplicity of Du Bois singularities: at a point of a $d$-dimensional variety with Du Bois singularities and embedding dimension $e$, the multiplicity is at most $\binom{e}{d}$. Additionally, the result recovers the previously known upper bound for the multiplicity of rational singularities.