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

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 conjectured `weak' inequality for all hypersurface singularities and for sufficiently large multiplicity strict complete intersections. The proofs establish general inequalities valid for any normal surface singularity.