Finite schemes and secant varieties over arbitrary characteristic

We present scheme theoretic methods that apply to the study of secant varieties. This mainly concerns finite schemes and their smoothability. The theory generalises to the base fields of any characteristic, and even to non-algebraically closed fields. In particular, the smoothability of finite schemes does not depend on the embedding into a smooth variety or on base field extensions. Independent of the base field, secant varieties to high degree Veronese reembeddings behave well with respect to the intersection and they are defined by minors of catalecticants whenever a suitable smoothability condition for Gorenstein subschemes holds. The content of the article is largely expository, although many results are presented in a stronger form than in the literature.