This Week’s Finds In Number Theory

Twenty years ago yesterday, John Baez posted the first installment of This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics.  In so doing, he invented the math blog, and, quite possibly, the blog itself.  A lot of mathematicians of my generation found in John’s blog an accessible, informal, but never dumbed-down window beyond what we were learning in classes, into the messy and contentious ground of current research.  And everybody who blogs now owes him a gigantic debt.

In his honor I thought it would be a good idea to post a “This Week’s Finds” style post of my own, with capsule summaries of a few papers I’ve recently noted with pleasure and interest.  I won’t be able to weave these into a story the way John often did, though!  Nor will there be awesome ASCII graphics.  Nor will any of the papers actually be from this week, because I’m a little behind on my math.NT abstract scanning.

If you run a math blog, please consider doing the same in your own field!  I’ll link to it.

Update:  It begins!  Valeria de Palva offers This Week’s Finds In Categorical Logic.  And Matt Ward, a grad student at UW-Seattle, has This Week’s Finds in Arithmetic Geometry.

1)  “On sets defining few ordinary lines,” by Ben Green and Terry Tao.

The idea that has launched a thousand papers in additive combinatorics:  if you are a set approximately closed under some kind of relation, then you are approximately a set which is actually closed under that kind of relation.  Subset of a group mostly closed under multiplication?  You must be close to an honest subgroup.  Subset of Z with too many pair-sums agreeing?  You have an unusually large intersection with an authentic arithmetic progression.  And so on.

This new paper considers the case of sets in R^2 with few ordinary lines; that is, sets S such that most lines that intersect S at all intersect S in three or more points.  How can you cook up a set of points with this property?  There are various boring ways, like making all the points collinear.  But there’s only one interesting way I can think of:  have the points form an “arithmetic progression” …,-3P,-2P, -P, P,2P,3P, …. in an elliptic curve!  (A finite subgroup also works.)  Then the usual description of the group law on the curve tells us that the line joining two points of S quite often passes through a third.  Green and Tao prove a remarkable quasi-converse to this fact:  if a set has few ordinary lines, it must be concentrated on a cubic algebraic curve!  This might be my favorite “approximately structured implies approximates a structure” theorem yet.

2) “Asymptotic behavior of rational curves,” by David Bourqui.  Oh, I was about to start writing this but when I searched I realized I already blogged about this paper when it came out!  I leave this here because the paper is just as interesting now as it was then…

3) “The fluctuations in the number of points of smooth plane curves over finite fields,” by Alina Bucur, Chantal David, Brooke Feigon, and Matilde Lalin;

“The probability that a complete intersection is smooth,” by Alina Bucur and Kiran Kedlaya;

“The distribution of the number of points on trigonal curves over F_q,” by Melanie Matchett Wood;

“Semiample Bertini theorems over finite fields,” by Daniel Erman and Melanie Matchett Wood.

How many rational points does a curve over F_q have?  We discussed this question here a few years ago, coming to no clear conclusion.  I still maintain that if the curve is understood to vary over M_g(F_q), with q fixed and g growing, the problem is ridiculously hard.

But in more manageable families of curves, we now know a lot more than we did in 2008.

You might guess, of course, that the average number of points should be q+1; if you have to reason to think of Frobenius as biased towards having positive or negative trace, why not guess that the trace, on average, is 0?  Bucur-David-Feigon-Lalin prove that this is exactly the case for a random smooth plane curve.  It’s not hard to check that this holds for a random hyperelliptic curve as well.  But for a random trigonal curve, Wood proves that the answer is different — the average is slightly less than q+2!

Where did the extra point come from?

Here’s one way I like to think of it.  This is very vague, and proves nothing, of course.  The trigonal curve X has a degree-3 map to P^1, which is ramified at some divisor D in P^1.  If D is a random divisor, it has one F_q-point on average.  How many F_q-points on X lie over each rational point P of D?  Well, generically, the ramification is going to be simple, and this means that there are two rational points over D; the branch point, and the unique unramified point.  Over every other F_q-point of D, the Frobenius action on the preimage in X should be a random element of S_3, with an average of one fixed point.  To sum up, in expectation we should see q rational points of X over q non-branch rational points of P^1, and 2 rational points of X over a single rational branch point in P^1, for a total of q+2.

(Erman and Wood, in a paper released just a few months ago, prove much more general results of a similar flavor about smooth members of linear systems on P^1 x P^1 (or other Hirzebruch surfaces, or other varieties entirely) which are semiample; for instance, they may have a map to P^1 which stays constant in degree, while their intersection with another divisor gets larger and larger.)

Most mysterious of all is the theorem of Bucur and Kedlaya, which shows (among other things) that if X is a random smooth intersection of two hypersurfaces of large degree in P^3, then the size of |X(F_q)| is slightly less than q+1 on average.  For this phenomenon I have no heuristic explanation at all.  What’s keeping the points away?

Disks in a box, update

In April, I blogged about the space of small disks in a box.  One question I mentioned there was the following:  if C(n,r) is the space of configurations of n non-overlapping disks of radius r in a box of sidelength 1, what kind of upper bounds on r assure that C(n,r) is connected?  A recent preprint of Matthew Kahle gives some insight into this question: he produces configurations of disks which are stable (each disk is hemmed in by its neighbors) with r on order of 1/n.  (In particular, the density of such configurations goes to 0 as n goes to infinity.)  Note that Kahle’s configurations are not obviously isolated points in C(n,r); it could be, and Kahle suggests it is likely to be, that his configurations can be deformed by moving several disks at once.

Also appearing in Kahle’s paper is the stable 5-disk configuration at left; this one is in fact an isolated point in C(5,r).

More Kahle: another recent paper, with Babson and Hoffman, features the theorem that a random 2-complex on n vertices, where the edges are all present and each 2-face appears with probability p, transitions from non-simply-connected to simply connected when p crosses n^{-1/2}.  This is in sharp contrast with the H_1 of the complex with Z/ ell Z coefficients, which disappears almost surely once p exceeds 2 log n / n, by a result of Meshulam and Wallach.  So in some huge range, the fundamental group is almost surely a big group with no nontrivial abelian quotient!  (I guess this doesn’t formally follow from Meshulam-Wallach unless you have some reasonable uniformity in ell…)

One naturally wonders:  Let pi_1(n,p) be the fundamental group of a random 2-complex on n vertices with facial probability p.   If G is a finite simple group, what is the expected number of surjections from pi_1(n,p) to G?  Does it sharply transition from nonzero to zero?  Is there a range of p in which pi_1(n,p) is almost certainly an infinite group with no finite quotients?

Blogging my orphans: n points in the plane with no three collinear

“Orphans” are things you meant to think about but which you’ve regretfully concluded are never going to rise to the top of the stack. Ideas you never finished having.

Blogging your orphans seems a good use of a math blog, or even a partial math blog like this one — at best, someone else will be able to tell you what’s interesting about your question, or even derive some interest from it themselves; and at worst, someone will be able to explain to you why your question is in fact not interesting, thus setting your mind at ease.

Anyway: the mention of Voronoi cells reminded me of a question that once vexed me about combinatorial geometry in R^2. The question actually arose from an article I wrote about Howard Rosenthal and Keith Poole, political scientists who use data from Congressional votes to map legislators onto low-dimensional Euclidean space. But their method doesn’t really specify points in R^n. When n = 1, for instance, what they get is not a set of 535 points on the real line, but an ordering of the 535 legislators along an axis representing liberalism at one end and conservatism at the other.

What’s really being recorded by the projection of Congress to R^2? I think it’s something like this — for each triple of legislators (x,y,z) you ask: is z to the left or the right of the ray that starts at x and proceeds towards y?

There are n! possible orderings of n points on the line. How many “orderings” are there of n points in the plane?

An algebraic combinatorist might phrase the question like this: Let M be a 3xn matrix with real entries, where the third column consists entirely of 1′s. Suppose every 3×3 minor of M is nonsingular. Then let f(M) be a function from the set of 3-tuples of distinct elements of [1..n] to the set {+1,-1}, where you assign to each 3-tuple (i,j,k) with i < j < k the sign of the determinant of the 3×3 matrix formed by rows i,j,k of M.

Question: As M ranges over 3xn matrices of the given form, how many different functions f(M) are there?

An obvious upper bound is 2^(n choose 3), but this is way too big. Note that if you replace “3″ by “2″, the answer to the analogous question is n!.

As a geometer, I’d phrase the question in a different (but I think equivalent) way:

Question: Let X_n be the space of ordered n-tuples of points in R^2 such that no three points are collinear. How many components does X_n have?

Again, if you replace R^2 with R^1 and “no three points are collinear” with “no two points coincide,” you get n!.

Let a(n) be the answer to the questions above (which, if I am not confused, have the same answer.) Then a(3) = 2 and a(4) = 14, and I think maybe a(5) is 252 but I’m not really sure. Combinatorial geometers with a soft spot for orphans, tell me more!