POINTS ON HYPERBOLAS AT RATIONAL DISTANCE

Number theory is the part of mathematics concerned with the mysterious and hidden properties of the integers and rational numbers (by a rational number, we mean the ratio of two integers). The congruent number problem, the written history of which can be traced back at least a millennium, is the oldest unsolved major problem in number theory, and perhaps in the whole of mathematics. We say that a right-angled triangle is “rational” if all its sides have rational length. A positive integer N is said to be “congruent” if it is the area of a rational right-angled triangle. If we multiply any congruent number N by the square of an integer, we again get a congruent number, and so it suffices to consider only those integers N that are square-free (meaning not divisible by the square of an integer >1). The congruent number problem is simply the question of deciding which square-free positive integers are, or are not, congruent numbers. Long ago, it was realized that an integer N ≥ 1 is congruent if and only if there exists a point (x, y) on the elliptic curve y2 = x3 − N2x, with rational coordinates x, y and with y ≠ 0. Until the 17th century, mathematicians made numerical tables of congruent numbers by using ingenuity to write down the corresponding rational right-angled triangles. For example, the integers 5, 6, and 7 were all known to be congruent, as they are the areas of the right-angled triangles, whose sides lengths are given respectively by [40/6, 9/6, 41/6], [3, 4, 5], and [288/60, 175/60, 337/60]. The first important theoretical result about congruent numbers was established by Fermat, who proved in the 17th century that 1 is not a congruent number. As explained in more …

Одной из актуальных современных проблем алгебры и теории чисел является проблема существования и поиска фундаментальных S-единиц в гиперэллиптических полях. Проблема существования и поиска S-единиц в гиперэллиптических полях эквивалентна разрешимости норменного уравнения - функционального уравнения Пелля - с некоторыми дополнительными условиями на вид этого уравнения и его решения. Существуетглубокая связь между точками конечного порядка в якобиевом многообразии (якобиане) гиперэллиптической кривой и нетривиальными S-единицами соответствующего гиперэллиптического поля. Эта связь легла в основу предложенного В. П. Платоновым алгебраического подхода к известной фундаментальной проблеме об ограниченности кручения в якобиевых многообразиях гиперэллиптических кривых. Для эллиптических кривых над полем рациональных чисел проблема кручения была решена Мазуром в 1970-ых годах. Для кривых рода 2 и выше над полем рациональных чисел проблема кручения оказалась значительно сложнее, и пока далека от своего полного решения. Основные результаты, полученные к настоящему времени в этом направлении, относятся к описанию подгрупп кручения якобиевых многообразий конкретных гиперэллиптических кривых, а также к описанию некоторых семейств гиперэллиптических кривых рода g >= 2.В данной статье нами найден новый метод исследования разрешимости функциональных норменных уравнений, дающий полное описание гиперэллиптических кривых над полем рациональных чисел, якобиевы многообразия которых обладают точками кручения данных порядков. Наш метод основан на аналитическом изучении представителей дивизоров конечного порядка в группе классов дивизоров степени ноль и их представлений Мамфорда. В качестве иллюстрации работы нашего метода в данной статье непосредственно найдены все параметрические семейства гиперэллиптических кривых рода два над полем рациональных чисел, якобиевы многообразия которых обладают рациональными точками кручения порядков не превосходящих пяти. Более того, наш метод позволяет определить, какому найденному параметрическому семейству принадлежит данная кривая, якобиан которой обладает точкой кручения порядка, не превосходящего пяти.

We construct rational Poncelet configurations, which means finite sets of pairwise distinct [Formula: see text]-rational points [Formula: see text] in the plane such that all [Formula: see text] are on a fixed conic section defined over [Formula: see text], and moreover the lines [Formula: see text] are all tangent to some other fixed conic section defined over [Formula: see text]. This is done for [Formula: see text] in which case only [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] are possible, and for certain real quadratic number fields [Formula: see text]; here moreover [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] occur, but no further new values of [Formula: see text]. In fact, for every pair [Formula: see text] presented here, we show that infinitely many such tuples [Formula: see text] exist. The construction uses elliptic curves [Formula: see text] over [Formula: see text] such that the group [Formula: see text] is infinite and moreover contains a point of exact order [Formula: see text]. As an aside, a formulation of Mazur’s theorem/Ogg’s conjecture in terms of arbitrary genus one curves over the rational numbers (so not necessarily containing any rational point) is presented, since this occurs naturally in the context of Poncelet configurations.

The set {1, 25, 49} is a 3-term collection of integers which forms an arithmetic progression of perfect squares. We view the set {(1, 1), (5, 25), (7, 49)} as a 3-term collection of rational points on the parabola y = x2whose y-coordinates form an arithmetic progression. In this exposition, we provide a generalization to 3-term arithmetic progressions on arbitrary conic sections [Formula: see text] with respect to a linear rational map [Formula: see text]. We explain how this construction is related to rational points on the universal elliptic curve Y2+ 4XY + 4kY = X3+ kX2classifying those curves possessing a rational 4-torsion point.

We study rational points on conic bundles over elliptic curves with positive rank over a number field. We show that the étale Brauer–Manin obstruction is insufficient to explain failures of the Hasse principle for such varieties. We then further consider properties of the distribution of the set of rational points with respect to its image in the rational points of the elliptic curve. In the process, we prove results on a local-to-global principle for torsion points on elliptic curves over \({{{\mathbb {Q}}}}\).

Let C be a smooth genus one curve described by a quartic polynomial equation over the rational field \({{\mathbb {Q}}}\) with \(P\in C({{\mathbb {Q}}})\). We give an explicit criterion for the divisibility-by-2 of a rational point on the elliptic curve (C, P). This provides an analogue to the classical criterion of the divisibility-by-2 on elliptic curves described by Weierstrass equations. We employ this criterion to investigate the question of extending a rational D(q)-quadruple to a quintuple. We give concrete examples to which we can give an affirmative answer. One of these results implies that although the rational \( D(16t+9) \)-quadruple \(\{t, 16t+8,2 25t+14, 36t+20 \}\) can not be extended to a polynomial \( D(16t+9) \)-quintuple using a linear polynomial, there are infinitely many rational values of t for which the aforementioned rational \( D(16t+9) \)-quadruple can be extended to a rational \( D(16t+9) \)-quintuple. Moreover, these infinitely many values of t are parametrized by the rational points on a certain elliptic curve of positive Mordell–Weil rank.

We give a brief report on our computations of linear determinantal representations of smooth plane cubics over finite fields. After recalling a classical interpretation of linear determinantal representations as rational points on the affine part of Jacobian varieties, we give an algorithm to obtain all linear determinantal representations up to equivalence. We also report our recent study on computations of linear determinantal representations of twisted Fermat cubics defined over the field of rational numbers. This paper is a summary of the author's talk at the JSIAM JANT workshop on algorithmic number theory in March, 2016. Details will appear elsewhere.

We formalize and study several competing notions of versality for an action of a linear algebraic group on an algebraic varietyXX. Our main result is that these notions of versality are equivalent to various statements concerning rational points on twisted forms ofXX(existence of rational points, existence of a dense set of rational points, etc.). We give applications of this equivalence in both directions to study versality of group actions and rational points on algebraic varieties. We obtain similar results onpp-versality for a prime integerpp. An appendix, containing a letter from J.-P. Serre, puts the notion of versality in a historical perspective.

The finiteness of the group of rational points of the elliptic curve X0 (32) in the infinite cyclotomic two-extension field over the rational numbers is proved. For each finite step, the finiteness of the two-component of the Shafarevich-Tate group is proved and its structure is determined.

The Farey sequence of order n consists of all reduced fractions a / b between 0 and 1 with positive denominator b less or equal to n. The sums of the inverse denominators 1 / b of the Farey fractions in prescribed intervals with rational bounds have a simple main term, but the deviations are determined by an interesting sequence of polygonal functions \(f_n\). In a former paper we obtained a limit function for \(n \rightarrow \infty \), which describes a scaling behaviour of the functions \(f_n\) in the vicinity of any fixed rational number a / b and which is independent of a / b. In this paper we prove that \(f_n(a/b)\) tends to zero for \(n \rightarrow \infty \) by using elementary representation formulas for \(f_n(a/b)\) as well as a variant of the prime number theorem. An application of this result immediately gives a global version of the scaling behaviour of the functions \(f_n\) around the rational numbers.

Consider a study of two groups of individuals infected with a population of a genetically related heterogeneous mixture of viruses, and multiple viral sequences are sampled from each person. Based on estimates of genetic distances between pairs of aligned viral sequences within individuals, we develop four new tests to compare intra-individual genetic sequence diversity between the two groups. This problem is complicated by two levels of dependency in the data structure: (i) Within an individual, any pairwise distances that share a common sequence are positively correlated; and (ii) for any two pairings of individuals which share a person, the two differences in intra-individual distances between the paired individuals are positively correlated. The first proposed test is based on the difference in mean intra-individual pairwise distances pooled over all individuals in each group, standardized by a variance estimate that corrects for the correlation structure using U-statistic theory. The second procedure is a nonparametric rank-based analog of the first test, and the third test contrasts the set of subject-specific average intra-individual pairwise distances between the groups. These tests are very easy to use and solve correlation problem (i). The fourth procedure is based on a linear combination of all possible U-statistics calculated on independent, identically distributed sequence subdatasets, over the two levels (i) and (ii) of dependencies in the data, and is more complicated than the other tests but can be more powerful. Although the proposed methods are empirical and do not fully utilize knowledge from population genetics, the tests reflect biology through the evolutionary models used to derive the pairwise sequence distances. The new tests are evaluated theoretically and in a simulation study, and are applied to a dataset of 200 HIV sequences sampled from 21 children.

We construct some infinite families of hyperelliptic curves of genus 2 with exactly two rational points. In the proof, we first show that the Mordell–Weil ranks of these hyperelliptic curves are 0 and then determine the sets of rational points by using a Lutz–Nagell type theorem for hyperelliptic curves which was proven by Grant.

We establish various new results on a problem proposed by Mahler [Some suggestions for further research. Bull. Aust. Math. Soc.29 (1984), 101–108] concerning rational approximation to fractal sets by rational numbers inside and outside the set in question. Some of them provide a natural continuation and improvement of recent results of Broderick, Fishman and Reich, and Fishman and Simmons. A key feature is that many of our new results apply to more general, multi-dimensional fractal sets and require only mild assumptions on the iterated function system. Moreover, we provide a non-trivial lower bound for the distance of a rational number $p/q$ outside the Cantor middle-third set $C$ to the set $C$, in terms of the denominator $q$. We further discuss patterns of rational numbers in fractal sets. We highlight two of them: firstly, an upper bound for the number of rational (algebraic) numbers in a fractal set up to a given height (and degree) for a wide class of fractal sets; and secondly, we find properties of the denominator structure of rational points in ‘missing-digit’ Cantor sets, generalizing claims of Nagy and Bloshchitsyn.

For every number field k, we construct an affine algebraic surface X over k with a Zariski dense set of k-rational points, and a regular function f on X inducing an injective map $$X(k)\rightarrow k$$ on k-rational points. In fact, given any elliptic curve E of positive rank over k, we can take $$X=V\times V$$ with V a suitable affine open set of E. The method of proof combines value distribution theory for complex holomorphic maps with results of Faltings on rational points in sub-varieties of abelian varieties.

Rational points on elliptic curves with complex multiplication by the ring of integers in [formula omitted](√−7)