This is an essay to accompany the author's lecture at the introductory workshop on `Nonabelian fundamental groups in arithmetic geometry' at the Newton Institute, Cambridge in July, 2009.
A remark about the role of Galois theory in Diophantine geometry as reflected in the work of Serge Lang. An entry in `The mathematical contributions of Serge Lang.'
This note provides an insight to the diophantine properties of abelian surfaces with quaternionic multiplication over number fields. We study the fields of definition of the endomorphisms on these abelian varieties and the images of the Galois representations on their Tate modules. We illustrate our results with several explicit examples.
We use non-abelian fundamental groups to define a sequence of higher reciprocity maps on the adelic points of a variety over a number field satisfying certain conditions in Galois cohomology. The non-abelian reciprocity law then states that the global points are contained in the kernel of all the reciprocity maps.
Using Felgner's problem I revisit a key issue in using the "Galois Stratification Procedure" that first appeared in [FrS76]. The emphasis here is on using arithmetic homotopy to make the production of Poincare; series attached to general diophantine statements canonical. According to work in progress of Michael Benedikt and E. Hrushovski, Galois stratification - over one finite field - is as efficient as is possible: on a statement of length n, it requires time bounded by a stack of exponentials of length linear in n. This doesn't take advantage of problems prepped for using homotopy aspects, …
We present some results on projective toric varieties which are relevant in Diophantine geometry. We interpret and study several invariants attached to these varieties in geometrical and combinatorial terms. We also give a Bézout theorem for the Chow weights of projective varieties and an application to the theorem of successive minima.
This text is the write-up of a talk at the Bellairs Workshop in Number Theory on Tropical and Non-Archimedean Geometry that took place at the Bellairs Research Institute, Barbados, in May 2011. The goal of this text is to present recent work by in Diophantine Geometry over function fields due to Gubler and Yamaki, where analytic geometry in the sense of Berkovich plays a significant place. I also give an introduction to basic concepts and notions on Diophantine Geometry, such as heights, the Manin-Mumford conjecture, the Bogomolov conjecture, and its proof by Ullmo and Zhang.
We describe recent work connecting combinatorics and tropical/non-Archimedean geometry to Diophantine geometry, particularly the uniformity conjectures for rational points on curves and for torsion packets of curves. The method of Chabauty--Coleman lies at the heart of this connection, and we emphasize the clarification that tropical geometry affords throughout the theory of $p$-adic integration, especially to the comparison of analytic continuations of $p$-adic integrals and to the analysis of zeros of integrals on domains admitting monodromy.
In the present paper, we will show that three apparently disjoint objects: Galois representations arising from twenty-seven lines on a cubic surface (number theory and arithmetic algebraic geometry), Picard modular forms (automorphic forms), rigid Calabi-Yau threefolds and their arithmetic (Diophantine geometry) are intimately related to Hessian polyhedra and their invariants. We construct a Galois representation whose image is a proper subgroup of $W(E_6)$, the Weyl group of the exceptional Lie algebra $E_6$. We give a conjecture about the identification of two different kinds of $L$-function…
In this note, we explore the notion of hyperbolicity of topologically finitely generated profinite groups. Some applications to diophantine geometry are suggested and we try to reformulate certain problems in diophantine geometry in terms of hyperbolic profinite groups. Then, we introduce many occasions in which Galois groups are free profinite and try to explore implications of this condition in the world of diophantine geometry. In particular, we prove that, Grothendieck's "section conjecture" plus Shafarevich's "freeness conjecture" imply that hyperbolic curves have infinitely many solution…
In a recent paper, J.-B. Bost establishes a criterion for certain ``formal subvarieties'' of algebraic varieties to be algebraic. His theorem unifies and generalizes results of Chudnovsky's and Y. André, motivated by an arithmetic conjecture of Grothendieck that predicts that the solutions of certain differential equations are algebraic functions. The proof makes use of the diophantine approximation techniques introduced by these authors but with a systematic geometric point of view, notably via Arakelov geometry and the formalism of ``slopes''.
This is a revised compilation of the papers arXiv:1105.1554 and arXiv:1105.5823. We develop some of the ideas belonging to W.Schmidt and L.Summerer to define intermediate Diophantine exponents and split several transference inequalities into a chain of inequalities for intermediate exponents.
We discuss the following two problems: 1) The properties of the multiple zeta-values and their generalizations, multiple polylogarithms at N-th roots of unity; 2) The action of the absolute Galois group on the pro-l-completion of the fundamental group of the projective line without zero, infinity, and all N-th roots of unity; and a surprising connection of these problems with the geometry and topology of modular varieties for GL_m.
We consider the average-case complexity of some otherwise undecidable or open Diophantine problems. More precisely, we show that the following two problems can be solved in the complexity class PSPACE: (I) Given polynomials f_1,...,f_m in Z[x_1,...,x_n] defining a variety of dimension <=0 in C^n, find all solutions in Z^n of f_1=...=f_m=0. (II) For a given polynomial f in Z[v,x,y] defining an irreducible nonsingular non-ruled surface in C^3, decide the sentence ``\exists v \forall x \exists y such that f(v,x,y)=0?'' quantified over N. Better still, we show that the truth of the Generalized Rie…
A general form of the Borel-Cantelli Lemma and its connection with the proof of Khintchine's Theorem on Diophantine approximation and the more general Khintchine-Groshev theorem are discussed. The torus geometry in the planar case allows a relatively direct proof of the planar Groshev theorem for the set of $ψ$-approximable points in the plane. The construction and use of Haudsorff measure and dimension are explained and the notion of ubiquity, which is effective in estimating the lower bound of the Hausdorff dimension for quite general lim sup sets, is described. An application is made to obt…
Erdős considered the second moment of the gap-counting function of prime divisors in 1946 and proved an upper bound that is not of the right order of magnitude. We prove asymptotics for all moments. Furthermore, we prove a generalisation stating that the gaps between primes $p$ for which there is no $\mathbb{Q}_p$-point on a random variety are Poisson distributed.
This survey contains an exposition of ideas and results related to Faltings' proof of the conjectures of Shafarevich, Tate and Mordell. This paper originally appeared in 1986 as an Appendix to the Russian translation of Serge Lang, "Fundamentals of Diophantine Geometry" (Springer Verlag, 1983) published by "Mir", Moscow (MR0854670, 88a:11054). A history of the publication of the Appendix is briefly described by Lang in Section 4 of his paper "Mordell's review, Siegel's letter to Mordell, Diophantine geometry, and 20th century mathematics" that was published (in 1995) simultaneously in Notices …
Using the variational principle in parametric geometry of numbers, we compute the Hausdorff and packing dimension of Diophantine sets related to exponents of Diophantine approximation, and their intersections. In particular, we extend a result of Jarník and Besicovitch to intermediate exponents.
In this paper we consider a multiparametric version of Wolfgang Schmidt and Leonard Summerer's parametric geometry of numbers. We apply this approach in two settings: the first one concerns weighted Diophantine approximation, the second one concerns Diophantine exponents of lattices. In both settings we use multiparametric approach to define intermediate exponents. Then we split the weighted version of Dyson's transference theorem and an analogue of Khintchine's transference theorem for Diophantine exponents of lattices into chains of inequalities between the intermediate exponents we define b…
Using the Parametric Geometry of Numbers introduced recently by W.M. Schmidt and L. Summerer and results by D. Roy, we establish that the spectrum of the $2n$ exponents of Diophantine approximation in dimension $n\geq3$ is a subset of $\mathbb{R}^{2n}$ with non empty interior.
We establish a new connection between metric Diophantine approximation and the parametric geometry of numbers by proving a variational principle facilitating the computation of the Hausdorff and packing dimensions of many sets of interest in Diophantine approximation. In particular, we show that the Hausdorff and packing dimensions of the set of singular $m\times n$ matrices are both equal to $mn \big(1-\frac1{m+n}\big)$, thus proving a conjecture of Kadyrov, Kleinbock, Lindenstrauss, and Margulis (preprint 2014) as well as answering a question of Bugeaud, Cheung, and Chevallier (preprint 2016…
We construct moduli stacks of two-dimensional mod p representations of the absolute Galois group of a p-adic local field, as well as their resolutions by moduli stacks of two-dimensional Breuil-Kisin modules with tame descent data. We study the local geometry of these moduli stacks by comparing them with local models of Shimura varieties at hyperspecial and Iwahori level.
This survey article is an introduction to Diophantine Geometry at a basic undergraduate level. It focuses on Diophantine Equations and the qualitative description of their solutions rather than detailed proofs.
This paper is a sequel to our previous paper arXiv:1105.1554, where we defined two types of intermediate Diophantine exponents, connected them to Schmidt exponents and split Dyson's transference inequality into a chain of inequalities for intermediate exponents. Here we present splitting of some other transference inequalities involving both regular and uniform Diophantine exponents.
We study the action of the Galois group on the pro-l-completion of the fundamental group of P^1 - {0, infinity and N-th roots of unity}. We describe the Lie algebra of the image of the Galois action and relate with the geometry of the modular varieties for GL_m for m = 1,2,3,... This story is the l-adic side of the motivic theory of multiple polylogarithms at roots of unity, which generalize the classical cyclotomy theory.
Markov's theorem classifies the worst irrational numbers with respect to rational approximation and the indefinite binary quadratic forms whose values for integer arguments stay farthest away from zero. The main purpose of this paper is to present a new proof of Markov's theorem using hyperbolic geometry. The main ingredients are a dictionary to translate between hyperbolic geometry and algebra/number theory, and some very basic tools borrowed from modern geometric Teichmüller theory. Simple closed geodesics and ideal triangulations of the modular torus play an important role, and so do the pr…
Let X be a smooth projective curve of genus >1 over a field K which is finitely generated over the rationals. The section conjecture in Grothendieck's anabelian geometry says that the sections of the canonical projection from the arithmetic fundamental group of X onto the absolute Galois group of K are (up to conjugation) in one-to-one correspondence with K-rational points of X. The birational variant conjectures a similar correspondence where the fundamental group is replaced by the absolute Galois group of the function field K(X). The present paper proves the birational section conjecture fo…
In this paper Gauss integers are used for to develop some geometry of full Erdoes graphs which vertics are points with integer coordinates. These graphs are called Diophantine figures.
We establish a precise relation between Galois theory in its motivic form with the mathematical theory of perturbative renormalization (in the minimal subtraction scheme with dimensional regularization). We identify, through a Riemann-Hilbert correspondence based on the Birkhoff decomposition and the t'Hooft relations, a universal symmetry group (the "cosmic Galois group" suggested by Cartier), which contains the renormalization group and acts on the set of physical theories. This group is closely related to motivic Galois theory. We construct a universal singular frame of geometric nature, in…
Let $a_1,\ldots,a_n$ and $b_1,\ldots,b_m$ be fixed positive integers, and let ${\mathcal S}$ denote the set of all nonnegative integer solutions of the equation $x_1a_1+\ldots +x_na_n=y_1b_1+\ldots +y_mb_m$. A solution $(x_1,\ldots,x_n,y_1,\ldots,y_m)$ in ${\mathcal S}$ is called $\textit{minimal}$ if it cannot be expressed as the sum of two nonzero solutions in ${\mathcal S}$. For each pair $(i,j)$ with $1\leq i\leq n$ and $1\leq j\leq m$, the solution whose only nonzero coordinates are $x_i=b_j$ and $y_j=a_i$ is called a $\textit{generator}$. Our main result shows that every minimal solution…
Given a number field $K$ and an integer $m\geq 0$, let $K_m$ denote the maximal $m$-step solvable Galois extension of $K$ and write $G_K^m$ for the maximal $m$-step solvable Galois group Gal$(K_m/K)$ of $K$. In this paper, we prove that the isomorphy type of $K$ is determined by the isomorphy type of $G_K^3$. Further, we prove that $K_m/K$ is determined functorially by $G_K^{m+3}$ (resp. $G_K^{m+4}$) for $m\geq 2$ (resp. $m \leq 1$). This is a substantial sharpening of a famous theorem of Neukirch and Uchida. A key step in our proof is the establishment of the so-called local theory, which in …
We present a framework for tame geometry on Henselian valued fields which we call Hensel minimality. In the spirit of o-minimality, which is key to real geometry and several diophantine applications, we develop geometric results and applications for Hensel minimal structures that were previously known only under stronger, less axiomatic assumptions. We show existence of t-stratifications in Hensel minimal structures and Taylor approximation results which are key to non-archimedean versions of Pila-Wilkie point counting, Yomdin's parameterization results and to motivic integration. In this firs…
We study the geometry of algebraic numbers in the complex plane, and their Diophantine approximation, aided by extensive computer visualization. Motivated by these images, called algebraic starscapes, we describe the geometry of the map from the coefficient space of polynomials to the root space, focussing on the quadratic and cubic cases. The geometry describes and explains notable features of the illustrations, and motivates a geometric-minded recasting of fundamental results in the Diophantine approximation of the complex plane. The images provide a case-study in the symbiosis of illustrati…
Using the Parametric Geometry of Numbers introduced recently by W.M. Schmidt and L. Summerer and results by D. Roy, we show that German's transference inequalities between the two most classical exponents of uniform Diophantine approximation are optimal. Further, we establish that the spectrum of the $n$ uniform exponents of Diophantine approximation in dimension $n$ is a subset of $\mathbb{R}^n$ with non empty interior. Thus, no Jarník-type relation holds between them.
Recently, W. M. Schmidt and L. Summerer introduced a new theory which allowed them to recover the main known inequalities relating the usual exponents of Diophantine approximation to a point in $\mathbb{R}^n$, and to discover new ones. They first note that these exponents can be computed in terms of the successive minima of a parametric family of convex bodies attached to the given point. Then they prove that the $n$-tuple of these successive minima can in turn be approximated up to bounded difference by a function from a certain class. In this paper, we show that the same is true within a sma…
Let $K$ be a number field and $\mathcal{C}$ a full class of finite groups. We write $K^{\mathcal{C}}/K$ for the maximal pro-$\mathcal{C}$ Galois extension of $K$, and $G_K^{\mathcal{C}}$ for its Galois group. In this paper, we deal with the following question: ``For $i=1,2$, let $K_i$ be a number field, $\mathcal{C}_i$ a nontrivial full class of finite groups, and $σ:G_{K_1}^{\mathcal{C}_1}\overset \sim \rightarrow G_{K_2}^{\mathcal{C}_2}$ an isomorphism. Is $σ$ induced by a unique isomorphism between $K_2^{\mathcal{C}_2}/K_2$ and $K_1^{\mathcal{C}_1}/K_1$?'' In one of the main results, we ans…