This thesis consists of two parts. Part one revolves around a construction for homogeneous Gorenstein ideals and properties of these ideals. Part two focuses on the behavior of the Boij-Söderberg decomposition of lex ideals. Gorenstein ideals are known for their nice duality properties. For codimension two and three, the structures of Gorenstein ideals have been established by Hilbert-Burch and Buchsbaum-Eisenbud, respectively. However, although some important results have been found about Gorenstein ideals of higher codimension, there is no structure theorem proven for higher codimension cases. Kustin and Miller showed how to construct a Gorenstein ideals in local Gorenstein rings starting from smaller such ideals. A modification of their construction in the case of graded rings is discussed. In a Noetherian ring, for a given two homogeneous Gorenstein ideals, we construct another homogeneous Gorenstein ideal and so we describe the resulting ideal in terms of the initial homogeneous Gorenstein ideals. Gorenstein liaison theory plays a central role in this construction. Using liaison properties, we examine structural relations between the constructed homogeneous ideal and the starting ideals. Boij-Söderberg theory is a very recent theory. It arose from two conjectures given by Boij and Söderberg and their proof by Eisenbud and Schreyer. It establishes a unique decomposition for Betti diagram of graded modules over polynomial rings. In the second part of this thesis, we focus on Betti diagrams of lex ideals which are the ideals having the largest Betti numbers among the ideals with the same Hilbert function. We describe Boij-Söderberg decomposition of a lex ideal in terms of Boij-Söderberg decompositions of some related lex ideals.

Boij-Söderberg theory shows that the Betti table of a graded module can be written as a linear combination of pure diagrams with integer coefficients. In chapter 2 using Ferrers hypergraphs and simplicial polytopes, we provide interpretations of these coefficients for ideals with a d-linear resolution, their quotient rings, and for Gorenstein rings whose resolution has essentially at most two linear strands. We also establish a structural result on the decomposition in the case of quasi-Gorenstein modules. These results are published in the Journal of Algebra, see [25]. In chapter 3 we provide some further results about Boij-Söderberg decompositions. We show how truncation of a pure diagram impacts the decomposition. We also prove constructively that every integer multiple of a pure diagram of codimension 2 can be realized as the Betti table of a module. In chapter 4 we introduce the idea of a c-polar self-dual polytope. We prove that in dimension 2 only the odd n-gons have an embedding which is polar self-dual. We also define the family of Ferrers polytopes. We prove that the Ferrers polytope in dimension d is d-polar self-dual hence establishing a nontrivial example of a polar self-dual polytope in all dimension. Finally we prove that the Ferrers polytope in dimension d supports a cellular resolution of the Stanley-Reisner ring of the (d+3)-gon.