NTS ABSTRACT

Return to NTS Spring 2017

Sept 7

David Zureick-Brown

Progress on Mazur’s program B

I’ll discuss recent progress on Mazur’s ”Program B”, including my own recent work with Jeremy Rouse which completely classifies the possibilities for the 2-adic image of Galois associated to an elliptic curve over the rationals. I will also discuss a large number of other very recent results by many authors.

Sept 14

Solly Parenti

Unitary CM Fields and the Colmez Conjecture

Pierre Colmez conjectured a formula for the Faltings height of a CM abelian variety in terms of log derivatives of Artin L-functions arising from the CM type. We will study the relevant class functions in the case where our CM field contains an imaginary quadratic field and use this to extend the known cases of the conjecture.

Sept 21

Chao Li

Goldfeld's conjecture and congruences between Heegner points

Given an elliptic curve E over Q, a celebrated conjecture of Goldfeld asserts that a positive proportion of its quadratic twists should have analytic rank 0 (resp. 1). We show this conjecture holds whenever E has a rational 3-isogeny. We also prove the analogous result for the sextic twists of j-invariant 0 curves. For a more general elliptic curve E, we show that the number of quadratic twists of E up to twisting discriminant X of analytic rank 0 (resp. 1) is >> X/log^{5/6}X, improving the current best general bound towards Goldfeld's conjecture due to Ono--Skinner (resp. Perelli--Pomykala). We prove these results by establishing a congruence formula between p-adic logarithms of Heegner points based on Coleman's integration. This is joint work with Daniel Kriz.

Sept 28

Chao Li

Goldfeld's conjecture and congruences between Heegner points

By Faltings' theorem, any curve over Q of genus at least two has only finitely many rational points—but the bounds coming from known proofs of Faltings' theorem are often far from optimal. Chabauty's method gives much sharper bounds for curves whose Jacobian has low rank, and can even be refined to give uniform bounds on the number of rational points. This talk is concerned with Minhyong Kim's non-abelian analogue of Chabauty's method, which uses the unipotent fundamental group of the curve to remove the restriction on the rank. Kim's method relies on a "dimension hypothesis" that has only been proven unconditionally for certain classes of curves; I will give an overview of this method and discuss my recent work with Jordan Ellenberg where we prove this dimension hypothesis for any Galois cover of the projective line with solvable Galois group (which includes, for example, any hyperelliptic curve).