Category: number theory

Andre Weil on the Riemann hypothesis

Published October 15, 2008 by lievenlb

Don’t be fooled by introductory remarks to the effect that ‘the field with one element was conceived by Jacques Tits half a century ago, etc. etc.’

While this is a historic fact, and, Jacques Tits cannot be given enough credit for bringing a touch of surrealism into mathematics, but this is not the main drive for people getting into F_un, today.

There is a much deeper and older motivation behind most papers published recently on $\mathbb{F}_1 $. Few of the authors will be willing to let you in on the secret, though, because if they did, it would sound much too presumptuous…

So, let’s have it out into the open : F_un mathematics’ goal is no less than proving the Riemann Hypothesis.

And even then, authors hide behind a smoke screen. The ‘official’ explanation being “we would like to copy Weil’s proof of the Riemann hypothesis in the case of function fields of curves over finite fields, by considering spec(Z) as a ‘curve’ over an algebra ‘dessous’ Z namely $\mathbb{F}_1 $”. Alas, at this moment, none of the geometric approaches over the field with one element can make this stick.

Believe me for once, the main Jugendtraum of most authors is to get a grip on cyclotomy over $\mathbb{F}_1 $. It is no accident that Connes makes a dramatic pauze in his YouTubeVideo to let the viewer see this equation on the backboard

$\mathbb{F}_{1^n} \otimes_{\mathbb{F}_1} \mathbb{Z} = \mathbb{Z}[x]/(x^n-1) $

But, what is the basis of all this childlike enthusiasm? A somewhat concealed clue is given in the introduction of the Kapranov-Smirnov paper. They write :

“In [?] the affine line over $\mathbb{F}_1 $ was considered; it consists formally of 0 and all the roots of unity. Put slightly differently, this leads to the consideration of “algebraic extensions” of $\mathbb{F}_1 $. By analogy with genuine finite fields we would like to think that there is exactly one such extension of any given degree n, denote it by $\mathbb{F}_{1^n} $.

Of course, $\mathbb{F}_{1^n} $ does not exist in a rigorous sense, but we can think if a scheme $X $ contains n-th roots of unity, then it is defined over $\mathbb{F}_{1^n} $, so that there is a morphism

$p_X~:~X \rightarrow spec(\mathbb{F}_{1^n} $

The point of view that adjoining roots of unity is analogous to the extension of the base field goes back, at least to Weil (Lettre a Artin, Ouvres, vol 1) and Iwasawa…“

Okay, so rush down to your library, pick out the first of three volumes of Andre Weil’s collected works, look up his letter to Emil Artin written on July 10th 1942 (19 printed pages!), and head for the final section. Weil writes :

“Our proof of the Riemann hypothesis (in the function field case, red.) depended upon the extension of the function-fields by roots of unity, i.e. by constants; the way in which the Galois group of such extensions operates on the classes of divisors in the original field and its extensions gives a linear operator, the characteristic roots (i.e. the eigenvalues) of which are the roots of the zeta-function.

On a number field, the nearest we can get to this is by adjunction of $l^n $-th roots of unity, $l $ being fixed; the Galois group of this infinite extension is cyclic, and defines a linear operator on the projective limit of the (absolute) class groups of those successive finite extensions; this should have something to do with the roots of the zeta-function of the field. However, our extensions are ramified (but only at a finite number of places, viz. the prime divisors of $l $). Thus a preliminary study of similar problems in function-fields might enable one to guess what will happen in number-fields.”

A few years later, in 1947, he makes this a bit more explicit in his marvelous essay “L’avenir des mathematiques” (The future of mathematics). Weil is still in shell-shock after the events of the second WW, and writes in beautiful archaic French sentences lasting forever :

“L’hypothèse de Riemann, après qu’on eu perdu l’espoir de la démontrer par les méthodes de la théorie des fonctions, nous apparaît aujourd’hui sous un jour nouveau, qui la montre inséparable de la conjecture d’Artin sur les fonctions L, ces deux problèmes étant deux aspects d’une même question arithmético-algébrique, où l’étude simultanée de toutes les extensions cyclotomiques d’un corps de nombres donné jouera sans doute le rôle décisif.

L’arithmétique gausienne gravitait autour de la loi de réciprocité quadratique; nous savons maintenant que celle-ci n’est qu’un premier example, ou pour mieux dire le paradigme, des lois dites “du corps de classe”, qui gouvernent les extensions abéliennes des corps de nobres algébriques; nous savons formuler ces lois de manière à leur donner l’aspect d’un ensemble cohérent; mais, si plaisante à l’œil que soit cette façade, nous ne savons si elle ne masque pas des symmétries plus cachées.

Les automorphismes induits sur les groupes de classes par les automorphismes du corps, les propriétés des restes de normes dans les cas non cycliques, le passage à la limite (inductive ou projective) quand on remplace le corps de base par des extensions, par example cyclotomiques, de degré indéfiniment croissant, sont autant de questions sur lesquelles notre ignorance est à peu près complète, et dont l’étude contient peut-être la clef de l’hypothese de Riemann; étroitement liée à celles-ci est l’étude du conducteur d’Artin, et en particulier, dans le cas local, la recherche de la représentation dont la trace s’exprime au moyen des caractères simples avec des coefficients égaux aux exposants de leurs conducteurs.

Ce sont là quelques-unes des directions qu’on peut et qu’on doit songer à suivre afin de pénétrer dans le mystère des extensions non abéliennes; il n’est pas impossible que nous touchions là à des principes d’une fécondité extraordinaire, et que le premier pas décisif une fois fait dans cette voie doive nous ouvrir l’accès à de vastes domaines dont nous soupçonnons à peine l’existence; car jusqu’ici, pour amples que soient nos généralisations des résultats de Gauss, on ne peut dire que nus les ayons vraiment dépassés.”

the buckyball curve

Published July 2, 2008 by lievenlb

We are after the geometric trinity corresponding to the trinity of exceptional Galois groups

The surfaces on the right have the corresponding group on the left as their group of automorphisms. But, there is a lot more group-theoretic info hidden in the geometry. Before we sketch the $L_2(11) $ case, let us recall the simpler situation of $L_2(7) $.

There are some excellent web-page on the Klein quartic and it would be too hard to try to improve on them, so we refer to John Baez’ page and Greg Egan’s page for more details.

The Klein quartic is the degree 4 projective plane curve defined by the equation $x^3y+y^3z+z^3x=0 $. It can be tiled with a set of 24 regular heptagons, or alternatively with a set of 56 equilateral triangles and these two tilings are dual to each other

In the triangular tiling, there are 56 triangles, 84 edges and 24 vertices. The 56 triangles come in 7 bunches of 8 each and we give the 7 bunches of triangles each a different color as in the pictures below made by Greg Egan. Observe that in the hyperbolic tiling all triangles look alike, but in the picture on the left most of them get warped as we try to embed the quartic in 3-space (which is impossible to do properly). The non-warped triangles (the red ones) come into pairs, the top and bottom triangles of a triangular prism, one prism at each of the four ‘vertices’ of a tetrahedron.

The automorphism group $L_2(7) $ acts on these triangles as $S_4 $ acts on the triangles in a truncated cube.

The buckyball construction from a conjugacy class of order 11 elements from $L_2(11) $ recalled last time, has an analogon $L_2(7) $, leading to the truncated cube.

In $L_2(7) $ there are two conjugacy classes of subgroups isomorphic to $S_4 $ (the rotation-symmetry group of the cube) as well as two conjugacy classes of order 7 elements, each consisting of precisely 24 elements, say C and D. The normalizer subgroup of C has order 21, so there is a cyclic group of order 3 acting non-trivially on the conjugacy class C with 8 orbits consisting of three elements each. These are the eight triangles of the truncated cube identified above as the red triangles.

Shifting perspective, we can repeat this for each of the seven different colors. That is, we have seven truncated cubes in the Klein quartic. On each of them a copy of $S_4 $ acts and these subgroups form one of the two conjugacy classes of $S_4 $ in the group $L_2(7) $. The colors of the triangles of these seven truncated cubes are indicated by bullets in the picture above on the right. The other conjugacy class of $S_4 $’s act on ‘truncated anti-cubes’ which also come in seven bunches of which the color is indicated by a square in that picture.

If you spend enough time on it you will see that each (truncated) cube is completely disjoint from precisely 3 (truncated) anti-cubes. This reminds us of the Fano-plane (picture on the left) : it has 7 points (our seven truncated cubes), 7 lines (the truncated anti-cubes) and the incidence relation of points and lines corresponds to the disjointness of (truncated) cubes and anti-cubes! This is the geometric interpretation of the group-theoretic realization that $L_2(7) \simeq PGL_3(\mathbb{F}_2) $ is the isomorphism group of the projective plane over the finite field $\mathbb{F}_2 $ on two elements, that is, the Fano plane. The colors of the picture on the left indicate the colors of cubes (points) and anti-cubes (lines) consistent with Egan’s picture above.

Further, the 24 vertices correspond to the 24 cusps of the modular group $\Gamma(7) $. Recall that a modular interpretation of the Klein quartic is as $\mathbb{H}/\Gamma(7) $ where $\mathbb{H} $ is the upper half-plane on which the modular group $\Gamma = PSL_2(\mathbb{Z}) $ acts via Moebius transformations, that is, to a 2×2 matrix corresponds the transformation

[tex]\begin{bmatrix} a & b \\ c & d \end{bmatrix}[/tex] <----> $ z \mapsto \frac{az+b}{cz+d} $

Okay, now let’s briefly sketch the exciting results found by Pablo Martin and David Singerman in the paper From biplanes to the Klein quartic and the buckyball, extending the above to the group $L_2(11) $.

There is one important modification to be made. Recall that the Cayley-graph to get the truncated cube comes from taking as generators of the group $S_4 $ the set ${ (3,4),(1,2,3) } $, that is, an order two and an order three element, defining an epimorphism from the modular group $\Gamma= C_2 \ast C_3 \rightarrow S_4 $.

We have also seen that in order to get the buckyball as a Cayley-graph for $A_5 $ we need to take the generating set ${ (2,3)(4,5),(1,2,3,4,5) } $, so a degree two and a degree five element.

Hence, if we want to have a corresponding Riemann surface we’d better not start from the action of the modular group on the upper half-plane, but rather the action via Moebius transformations of the
Hecke group

$H^5 \simeq C_2 \ast C_5 = \langle z \mapsto -\frac{1}{z}, z \mapsto z+ \phi \rangle $

where $\phi = \frac{1 + \sqrt{5}}{2} $ is the golden ratio.

But then, there is an epimorphism $H^5 \rightarrow L_2(11) $ (as this group is generated by one element of degree 2 and one of degree 5) and let $\Lambda $ denote its kernel. Observe that $\Lambda $ is the analogon of the modular subgroup $\Gamma(7) $ used above to define the Klein quartic.

Hence, Martin and Singerman define the buckyball curve as the modular quotient $X=\mathbb{H}/\Lambda $ which is a Riemann surface of genus 70.

The terminlogy is motivated by the fact that, precisely as we got 7 truncated cubes in the Klein quartic, we now get 11 truncated icosahedra (that is, buckyballs) in $X $. The 11 coming, analogous to the Klein case, from thefact that there are precisely two conjugacy classes of subgroups of $L_2(11) $ isomorphic to $A_5 $, each class containing precisely eleven elements!
The 60 vertices of the buckyball again correspond to the fact that there are 60 cusps in this case.

So, what is the analogon of the Fano plane in this case? Well, observe that the Fano-plane is a biplane of order two. That is, if we take as ‘points’ the points of the Fano plane and as ‘lines’ the complements of lines in the Fano plane then this defines a biplane structure. This means that any two distinct ‘points’ are contained in two distinct ‘lines’ and that two distinct ‘lines’ intersect in two distinct ‘points’. A biplane is said to be of order k is each ‘line’ consist of k-2 ‘points’. As the complement of a line in the Fano plane consists of 4 points, the Fano plane is therefore a biplane of order 2. The intersection pattern of cubes and anti-cubes in the Klein quartic is this biplane structure on the Fano plane.

In a similar way, Martin and Singerman show that the two conjugacy classes of subgroups isomorphic to $A_5 $ in $L_2(11) $, each containing exactly 11 elements, correspond to 11 embedded buckyballs (and 11 anti-buckyballs) in the buckyball-curve $X $ and that the intersection relations among them describe the combinatorial structure of a biplane of order three if we view the 11 buckys as ‘points’ and the anti-buckys as ‘lines’.

That is, the buckyball curve is a perfect geometric counterpart of the Klein quartic for the two trinities

At the Arcadian Functor, Kea also has a post on this in which she conjectures that the Kac-Moody algebra of E11 may be related to the buckyball curve.

References :

David Singerman, “Klein’s Riemann surface of genus 3 and regular embeddings of finite projective planes” Bull. London Math. Soc. 18 (1986) 364-370.

Pablo Martin and David Singerman, “From biplanes to the Klein quartic and the Buckyball” (note that this is a preliminary version, please contact David Singerman for the latest version).

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Arnold’s trinities

Published June 17, 2008 by lievenlb

Referring to the triple of exceptional Galois groups $L_2(5),L_2(7),L_2(11) $ and its connection to the Platonic solids I wrote : “It sure seems that surprises often come in triples…”. Briefly I considered replacing triples by trinities, but then, I didnt want to sound too mystic…

David Corfield of the n-category cafe and a dialogue on infinity (and perhaps other blogs I’m unaware of) pointed me to the paper Symplectization, complexification and mathematical trinities by Vladimir I. Arnold. (Update : here is a PDF-conversion of the paper)

The paper is a write-up of the second in a series of three lectures Arnold gave in june 1997 at the meeting in the Fields Institute dedicated to his 60th birthday. The goal of that lecture was to explain some mathematical dreams he had.

The next dream I want to present is an even more fantastic set of theorems and conjectures. Here I also have no theory and actually the ideas form a kind of religion rather than mathematics.
The key observation is that in mathematics one encounters many trinities. I shall present a list of examples. The main dream (or conjecture) is that all these trinities are united by some rectangular “commutative diagrams”.
I mean the existence of some “functorial” constructions connecting different trinities. The knowledge of the existence of these diagrams provides some new conjectures which might turn to be true theorems.

Follows a list of 12 trinities, many taken from Arnold’s field of expertise being differential geometry. I’ll restrict to the more algebraically inclined ones.

1 : “The first trinity everyone knows is”

where $\mathbb{H} $ are the Hamiltonian quaternions. The trinity on the left may be natural to differential geometers who see real and complex and hyper-Kaehler manifolds as distinct but related beasts, but I’m willing to bet that most algebraists would settle for the trinity on the right where $\mathbb{O} $ are the octonions.

2 : The next trinity is that of the exceptional Lie algebras E6, E7 and E8.

with corresponding Dynkin-Coxeter diagrams

Arnold has this to say about the apparent ubiquity of Dynkin diagrams in mathematics.

Manin told me once that the reason why we always encounter this list in many different mathematical classifications is its presence in the hardware of our brain (which is thus unable to discover a more complicated scheme).
I still hope there exists a better reason that once should be discovered.

Amen to that. I’m quite hopeful human evolution will overcome the limitations of Manin’s brain…

3 : Next comes the Platonic trinity of the tetrahedron, cube and dodecahedron

Clearly one can argue against this trinity as follows : a tetrahedron is a bunch of triangles such that there are exactly 3 of them meeting in each vertex, a cube is a bunch of squares, again 3 meeting in every vertex, a dodecahedron is a bunch of pentagons 3 meeting in every vertex… and we can continue the pattern. What should be a bunch a hexagons such that in each vertex exactly 3 of them meet? Well, only one possibility : it must be the hexagonal tiling (on the left below). And in normal Euclidian space we cannot have a bunch of septagons such that three of them meet in every vertex, but in hyperbolic geometry this is still possible and leads to the Klein quartic (on the right). Check out this wonderful post by John Baez for more on this.

4 : The trinity of the rotation symmetry groups of the three Platonics

where $A_n $ is the alternating group on n letters and $S_n $ is the symmetric group.

Clearly, any rotation of a Platonic solid takes vertices to vertices, edges to edges and faces to faces. For the tetrahedron we can easily see the 4 of the group $A_4 $, say the 4 vertices. But what is the 4 of $S_4 $ in the case of a cube? Well, a cube has 4 body-diagonals and they are permuted under the rotational symmetries. The most difficult case is to see the $5 $ of $A_5 $ in the dodecahedron. Well, here’s the solution to this riddle

there are exactly 5 inscribed cubes in a dodecahedron and they are permuted by the rotations in the same way as $A_5 $.

7 : The seventh trinity involves complex polynomials in one variable

the Laurant polynomials and the modular polynomials (that is, rational functions with three poles at 0,1 and $\infty $.

8 : The eight one is another beauty

Here ‘numbers’ are the ordinary complex numbers $\mathbb{C} $, the ‘trigonometric numbers’ are the quantum version of those (aka q-numbers) which is a one-parameter deformation and finally, the ‘elliptic numbers’ are a two-dimensional deformation. If you ever encountered a Sklyanin algebra this will sound familiar.

This trinity is based on a paper of Turaev and Frenkel and I must come back to it some time…

The paper has some other nice trinities (such as those among Whitney, Chern and Pontryagin classes) but as I cannot add anything sensible to it, let us include a few more algebraic trinities. The first one attributed by Arnold to John McKay

13 : A trinity parallel to the exceptional Lie algebra one is

between the 27 straight lines on a cubic surface, the 28 bitangents on a quartic plane curve and the 120 tritangent planes of a canonic sextic curve of genus 4.

14 : The exceptional Galois groups

explained last time.

15 : The associated curves with these groups as symmetry groups (as in the previous post)

where the ? refers to the mysterious genus 70 curve. I’ll check with one of the authors whether there is still an embargo on the content of this paper and if not come back to it in full detail.

16 : The three generations of sporadic groups

Do you have other trinities you’d like to worship?