Fox-Neuwirth-Fuks cells, quantum shuffle algebras, and Malle’s conjecture for function fields: a new old paper

I have a new paper up on the arXiv today with TriThang Tran and Craig Westerland, “Fox-Neuwirth-Fuks cells, quantum shuffle algebras, and Malle’s conjecture for function fields.”

There’s a bit of a story behind this, but before I tell it, let me say what the paper’s about. The main result is an upper bound for the number of extensions with bounded discriminant and fixed Galois group of a rational function field F_q(t). More precisely: if G is a subgroup of S_n, and K is a global field, we can ask how many degree-n extensions of K there are whose discriminant is at most X and whose Galois closure has Galois group G. A long-standing conjecture of Malle predicts that this count is asymptotic to c X^a (log X)^b for explicitly predicted exponents a and b. This is a pretty central problem in arithmetic statistics, and in general it still seems completely out of reach; for instance, Bhargava’s work allows us to count quintic extensions of Q, and this result was extended to global fields of any characteristic other than 2 by Bhargava, Shankar, and Wang. But an asymptotic for the number of degree 6 extensions would be a massive advance.

The point of the present paper is to prove upper bounds for counting field extensions in the case of arbitrary G and rational function fields K = F_q(t) with q prime to and large enough relative to |G|; upper bounds which agree with Malle’s conjecture up to the power of log X. I’m pretty excited about this! Malle’s conjecture by now has very robust and convincing heuristic justification, but there are very few cases where we actually know anything about G-extensions for any but very special classes of finite groups G. There are even a few very special cases where the method gives both upper and lower bounds (for instance, A_4-extensions over function fields containing a cube root of 3.)

The central idea, as you might guess from the authors, is to recast this question as a problem about counting F_q-rational points on moduli spaces of G-covers, called Hurwitz spaces; by the Grothendieck-Lefschetz trace formula, we can bound these point counts if we can bound the etale Betti numbers of these spaces, and by comparison between characteristic p and characteristic 0 we can turn this into a topological problem about bounding cohomology groups of the braid group with certain coefficients.

Actually, let me say what these coefficients are. Let c be a subset of a finite group G closed under conjugacy, k a field, and V the k-vectorspace spanned by c. Then is spanned by the set of n-tuples (g_1, … , g_n) in c^n, and this set carries a natural action of the braid group, where twining strand i past strand i+1 corresponds to the permutation

So for each n we have a representation of the braid group Br_n, and it turns out that everything we desire would be downstream from good bounds on

So far, this is the same strategy (expressed a little differently) than was used in our earlier paper with Akshay Venkatesh to get results towards the Cohen-Lenstra conjecture over F_q(t). That paper concerned itself with the case where G was a (modestly generalized) dihedral group; there was a technical barrier that prevented us from saying anything about more general groups, and the novelty of the present paper is to find a way past that restriction. I’m not going to say very much about it here! I’ll just say it turns out that there’s a really nice way to package the cohomology groups above — indeed, even more generally, whenever V is a braided vector space, you have these braid group actions on the tensor powers, and the cohomology groups can be packaged together as the Ext groups over the quantum shuffle algebra associated to V. And it is this quantum shuffle algebra (actually, mostly its more manageable subalgebra, the Nichols algebra) that the bulk of this bulky paper studies.

But now to the story. You might notice that the arXiv stamp on this paper starts with 17! So yes — we have claimed this result before. I even blogged about it! But… that proof was not correct. The overall approach was the same as it is now, but our approach to bounding the cohomology of the Nichols algebra just wasn’t right, and we are incredibly indebted to Oscar Randall-Williams for making us aware of this.

For the last six years, we’ve been working on and off on fixing this. We kept thinking we had the decisive fix and then having it fall apart. But last spring, we had a new idea, Craig came and visited me for a very intense week, and by the end I think we were confident that we had a route — though getting to the present version of the paper occupied months after that.

A couple of thoughts about making mistakes in mathematics.

• I don’t think we really handled this properly. Experts in the field certainly knew we weren’t standing by the original claim, and we certainly told lots of people this in talks and in conversations, and I think in general there is still an understanding that if a preprint is sitting up on the arXiv for years and hasn’t been published, maybe there’s a reason — we haven’t completely abandoned the idea that a paper becomes more “official” when it’s refereed and published. But the right thing to do in this situation is what we did with an earlier paper with an incorrect proof — replaced the paper on arXiv with a placeholder saying it was inaccurate, and issued a public announcement. So why didn’t we do that? Probably because we were constantly in a state of feeling like we had a line on fixing the paper, and we wanted to update it with a correct version. I don’t actually think that’s a great reason — but that was the reason.
• When you break a bone it never exactly sets back the same way. And I think, having gotten this wrong before, I find it hard to be as self-assured about it as I am about most things I write. It’s long and it’s grainy and it has a lot of moving parts. But we have checked it as much as it’s possible for us to check it, over a long period of time. We understand it and we think we haven’t missed anything and so we think it’s correct now. And there’s no real alternative to putting it out into the world and saying we think it’s correct now.

Wanlin Li, “Vanishing of hyperelliptic L-functions at the central point”

My Ph.D. student Wanlin Li has posted her first paper!  And it’s very cool.  Here’s the idea.  If chi is a real quadratic Dirichlet character, there’s no reason the special value L(1/2,chi) should vanish; the functional equation doesn’t enforce it, there’s no group whose rank is supposed to be the order of vanishing, etc.  And there’s an old conjecture of Chowla which says the special value never vanishes.  On the very useful principle that what needn’t happen doesn’t happen.

Alexandra Florea (last seen on the blog here)  gave a great seminar here last year about quadratic L-functions over function fields, which gave Wanlin the idea of thinking about Chowla’s conjecture in that setting.  And something interesting developed — it turns out that Chowla’s conjecture is totally false!  OK, well, maybe not totally false.  Let’s put it this way.  If you count quadratic extensions of F_q(t) up to conductor N, Wanlin shows that at least c N^a of the corresponding L-functions vanish at the center of the critical strip.  The exponent a is either 1/2,1/3, or 1/5, depending on q.  But it is never 1.  Which is to say that Wanlin’s theorem leaves open the possibility that o(N) of the first N hyperelliptic L-functions vanishes at the critical point.  In other words, a density form of Chowla’s conjecture over function fields might still be true — in fact, I’d guess it probably is.

The main idea is to use some algebraic geometry.  To say an L-function vanishes at 1/2 is to say some Frobenius eigenvalue which has to have absolute value q^{1/2} is actually equal to q^{1/2}.  In turn, this is telling you that the hyperelliptic curve over F_q whose L-function you’re studying has a map to some fixed elliptic curve.  Well, that’s something you can make happen by physically writing down equations!  Of course you also need a lower bound for the number of distinct quadratic extensions of F_q(t) that arise this way; this is the most delicate part.

I think it’s very interesting to wonder what the truth of the matter is.  I hope I’ll be back in a few months to tell you what new things Wanlin has discovered about it!

 

Hast and Matei, “Moments of arithmetic functions in short intervals”

Two of my students, Daniel Hast and Vlad Matei, have an awesome new paper, and here I am to tell you about it!

A couple of years ago at AIM I saw Jon Keating talk about this charming paper by him and Ze’ev Rudnick.  Here’s the idea.  Let f be an arithmetic function: in that particular paper, it’s the von Mangoldt function, but you can ask the same question (and they do) for Möbius and many others.

Now we know the von Mangoldt function is 1 on average.  To be more precise: in a suitably long interval ( is long enough under Riemann) the average of von Mangoldt is always close to 1.  But the average over a short interval can vary.  You can think of the sum of von Mangoldt over  , with H = x^d,  as a function f(x) which has mean 1 but which for d < 1/2 need not be concentrated at 1.  Can we understand how much it varies?  For a start, can we compute its variance as x ranges from 1 to X?This is the subject of a conjecture of Goldston and Montgomery.  Keating and Rudnick don’t prove that conjecture in its original form; rather, they study the problem transposed into the context of the polynomial ring F_q[t].  Here, the analogue of archimedean absolute value is the absolute value

so an interval of size q^h is the set of f such that deg(f-f_0) < q^h for some polynomial f_0.

So you can take the monic polynomials of degree n, split that up into q^{n-h} intervals of size q^h, and sum f over each interval, and take the variance of all these sums.  Call this V_f(n,h).  What Keating and Rudnick show is that

.

This is not quite the analogue of the Goldston-Montgomery conjecture; that would be the limit as n,h grow with q fixed.  That, for now, seems out of reach.  Keating and Rudnick’s argument goes through the Katz equidistribution theorems (plus some rather hairy integration over groups) and the nature of those equidistribution theorems — like the Weil bounds from which they ultimately derive — is to give you control as q gets large with everything else fixed (or at least growing very slo-o-o-o-o-wly.)  Generally speaking, a large-q result like this reflects knowledge of the top cohomology group, while getting a fixed-q result requires some control of all the cohomology groups, or at least all the cohomology groups in a large range.

Now for Hast and Matei’s paper.  Their observation is that the variance of the von Mangoldt function can actually be studied algebro-geometrically without swinging the Katz hammer.  Namely:  there’s a variety X_{2,n,h} which parametrizes pairs (f_1,f_2) of monic degree-n polynomials whose difference has degree less than h, together with an ordering of the roots of each polynomial.  X_{2,n,h} carries an action of S_n x S_n by permuting the roots.  Write Y_{2,n,h} for the quotient by this action; that’s just the space of pairs of polynomials in the same h-interval.  Now the variance Keating and Rudnick ask about is more or less

where $\Lambda$ is the von Mangoldt function.  But note that $\Lambda(f_i)$ is completely determined by the factorization of $f_i$; this being the case, we can use Grothendieck-Lefschetz to express the sum above in terms of the Frobenius traces on the groups

where $V_\Lambda$ is a representation of $S_n \times S_n$ keeping track of the function $\Lambda$.  (This move is pretty standard and is the kind of thing that happens all over the place in my paper with Church and Farb about point-counting and representation stability, in section 2.2 particularly)

When the smoke clears, the behavior of the variance V(n,h) as q gets large is controlled by the top “interesting” cohomology group of X_{2,n,h}.  Now X_{2,n,h} is a complete intersection, so you might think its interesting cohomology is all in the middle.  But no — it’s singular, so you have to be more careful.  Hast and Matei carry out a careful analysis of the singular locus of X_{2,n,h}, and use this to show that the cohomology groups that vanish in a large range.  Outside that range, Weil bounds give an upper bound on the trace of Frobenius.  In the end they get

.

In other words, they get the order of growth from Keating-Rudnick but not the constant term, and they get it without invoking all the machinery of Katz.  What’s more, their argument has nothing to do with von Mangoldt; it applies to essentially any function of f that only depends on the degrees and multiplicities of the irreducible factors.

What would be really great is to understand that top cohomology group H as an S_n x S_n – representation.  That’s what you’d need in order to get that n-h-2 from Keating-Rudnick; you could just compute it as the inner product of H with .  You want the variance of a different arithmetic function, you pair H with a different representation.  H has all the answers.  But neither they nor I could see how to compute H.

Then came Brad Rodgers.  Two months ago, he posted a preprint which gets the constant term for the variance of any arithmetic function in short intervals.  His argument, like Keating-Rudnick, goes through Katz equidistribution.  This is the same information we would have gotten from knowing H.  And it turns out that Hast and Matei can actually provably recover H from Rodgers’ result; the point is that the power of q Rodgers get can only arise from H, because all the other cohomology groups of high enough weight are the ones Hast and Matei already showed are zero.

So in the end they find

where ranges over all partitions of n whose top row has length at most n-h-2.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this kind of representation come up before — is it familiar to anyone?

Anyway:  what I like so much about this new development is that it runs contrary to the main current in this subject, in which you prove theorems in topology or algebraic geometry and use them to solve counting problems in arithmetic statistics over function fields.  Here, the arrow goes the other way; from Rodgers’s counting theorem, they get a computation of a cohomology group which I can’t see any way to get at by algebraic geometry.  That’s cool!  The other example I know of the arrow going this direction is this beautiful paper of Browning and Vishe, in which they use the circle method over function fields to prove the irreducibility of spaces of rational curves on low-degree hypersurfaces.  I should blog about that paper too!  But this is already getting long….

 

 

“On l-torsion in class groups of number fields” (with L. Pierce, M.M. Wood)

New paper up with Lillian Pierce and Melanie Matchett Wood!

Here’s the deal.  We know a number field K of discriminant D_K has class group of size bounded above by roughly D_K^{1/2}.  On the other hand, if we fix a prime l, the l-torsion in the class group ought to be a lot smaller.  Conjectures of Cohen-Lenstra type predict that the average size of the l-torsion in the class group of D_K, as K ranges over a “reasonable family” of algebraic number fields, should be constant.  Very seldom do we actually know anything like this; we just have sporadic special cases, like the Davenport-Heilbronn theorem, which tells us that the 3-torsion in the class group of a random quadratic field is indeed constant on average.

But even though we don’t know what’s true on average, why shouldn’t we go ahead and speculate on what’s true universally?  It’s too much to ask that Cl(K)[l] literally be bounded as K varies (at least if you believe even the most modest version of Cohen-Lenstra, which predicts that any value of dim Cl(D_K)[l] appears for a positive proportion of quadratic fields K) but people do think it’s small:

Conjecture:  |Cl(K)[l]| < D_K^ε.

Even beating the trivial bound

|Cl(K)[l]| < |Cl(K)| < D_K^{1/2 + ε}

is not easy.  Lillian was the first to do it for 3-torsion in quadratic fields.  Later, Helfgott-Venkatesh and Venkatesh and I sharpened those bounds.  I hear from Frank Thorne that he, Bhargava, Shankar, Tsimerman and Zhao have a nontrivial bound on 2-torsion for the class group of number fields of any degree.

In the new paper with Pierce and Wood, we prove nontrivial bounds for the average size of the l-torsion in the class group of K, where l is any integer, and K is a random number field of degree at most 5.  These bounds match the conditional bounds Akshay and I get on GRH.  The point, briefly, is this.  To make our argument work, Akshay and I needed GRH in order to guarantee the existence of a lot of small rational primes which split in K.  (In a few cases, like 3-torsion of quadratic fields, we used a “Scholz reflection trick” to get around this necessity.)  At the time, there was no way to guarantee small split primes unconditionally, even on average.  But thanks to the developments of the last decade, we now know a lot more about how to count number fields of small degree, even if we want to do something delicate like keep track of local conditions.  So, for instance, not only can one count quartic fields of discriminant < X, we can count fields which have specified decomposition at any specified finite set of rational primes.  This turns out to be enough — as long as you are super-careful with error terms! — to  allow us to show, unconditionally, that most number fields of discriminant < D have enough small split primes to make the bound on l-torsion go.  Hopefully, the care we took here to get counts with explicit error terms for number fields subject to local conditions will be useful for other applications too.

 

How many points does a random curve over F_q have?

So asks a charming preprint by Achter, Erman, Kedlaya, Wood, and Zureick-Brown.  (2/5 Wisconsin, 1/5 ex-Wisconsin!)  The paper, I’m happy to say, is a result of discussions at an AIM workshop on arithmetic statistics I organized with Alina Bucur and Chantal David earlier this year.

Here’s how they think of this.  By a random curve we might mean a curve drawn uniformly from M_g(F_q).  Let X be the number of points on a random curve.  Then the average number of points on a random curve also has a geometric interpretation: it is

What about

?

That’s just the average number of ordered pairs of distinct points on a random curve; the expected value of X(X-1).

If we can compute all these expected values, we have all the moments of X, which should give us a good idea as to its distribution.  Now if life were as easy as possible, the moduli spaces of curves would have no cohomology past degree 0, and by Grothendieck-Lefschetz, the number of points on M_{g,n} would be q^{3g-3+n}.  In that case, we’d have that the expected value of X(X-1)…(X-n) was q^n.  Hey, I know what distribution that is!  It’s Poisson with mean q.

Now M_g does have cohomology past degree 0.  The good news is, thanks to the Madsen-Weiss theorem (née the Mumford conjecture) we know what that cohomology is, at least stably.  Yes, there are a lot of unstable classes, too, but the authors propose that heuristically these shouldn’t contribute anything.  (The point is that the contribution from the unstable range should look like traces of gigantic random unitary matrices, which, I learn from this paper, are bounded with probability 1 — I didn’t know this, actually!)  And you can even make this heuristic into a fact, if you want, by letting q grow pretty quickly relative to g.

So something quite nice happens:  if you apply Grothendieck-Lefschetz (actually, you’d better throw in Kai Behrend’s name, too, because M_g is a Deligne-Mumford stack, not an honest scheme) you find that the moments of X still agree with those of a Poisson distribution!  But the contribution of the tautological cohomology shifts the mean from q to q+1+1/(q-1).

This is cool in many directions!

• It satisfies one’s feeling that a “random set,” if it carries no extra structure, should have cardinality obeying a Poisson distribution — the “uniform distribution” on the groupoid of sets.  (Though actually that uniform distribution is Poisson(1); I wonder what tweak is necessary to be able to tune the mean?)
• I once blogged about an interesting result of Bucur and Kedlaya which showed that a random smooth complete intersection curve in P^3 of fixed degree had slightly fewer than q+1 points; in fact, about q+1 – 1/q + o(q^2).  Here the deviation is negative, rather than positive, as the new paper suggests is the case for general curves; what’s going on?
• I have blogged about the question of average number of points on a random curve before.  I’d be very interested to know whether the new heuristic agrees with the answer to the question proposed at the end of that post; if g is a large random matrix in GSp(Z_ell) with algebraic eigenvalues, and which multiplies the symplectic form by q, and you condition on Tr(g^k) > (-q^k-1) so that the “curve” has nonnegatively many points over each extension of F_q, does this give something like the distribution the five authors predict for Tr(g)?  (Note:  I don’t think this question is exactly well-formed as stated.)

 

Silas Johnson on weighted discriminants with mass formulas

My Ph.D. student Silas Johnson just posted his thesis paper to the arXiv, and it’s cool, and I’m going to blog about it!

How should you count number fields?  The most natural way is by discriminant; you count all degree-n number fields K with a given Galois group G in S_n and discriminant bounded in absolute value by B.  This gives you a value N_G(B) whose asymptotic behavior in B you might want to study.  The classical results and exciting new ones you’ve heard about — Davenport-Heilbron, Bhargava, and all that — generally concern counts of this kind.

But there are reasons to consider other kinds of counts.  I once had a bunch of undergrads investigate the behavior of N_3(X,Y), the number of cubic fields whose discriminant had squarefree part at most X and maximal square divisor at most Y.  This gives a more refined picture of the ramification behavior of the fields.  Asymptotics for this are still unknown!  (I would expect the main term to be on order , but I don’t know what the secondary terms should be.)

One nice thing about the discriminant, though, is that it has a mass formula.  In brief:  a map f from Gal(Q_p) to S_n corresponds to a degree-n extension of Q_p, which has a discriminant (a power of p) which we call Disc(f).  Averaging Disc(f)^{-1} over all homomorphisms f gives you a polynomial in p^{-1}, which we call the local mass.  Now here’s the remarkable fact (shown by Bhargava, deriving from a formula of Serre) — there is a universal polynomial P(x) such that the local mass at p is equal to P(p^{-1}) for every P.  This is not hard to show for the tame primes p (you can see this point discussed in Silas’s paper or in the paper by Kedlaya I linked above) but that it holds for the wild primes is rather mysterious and strange.  And it certainly seems to ratify the idea that there’s something especially nice about the discriminant.  What’s more, this polynomial P is not just some random thing; it’s the product over p of P(p^{-1}) that gives the constant in Bhargava’s conjectural asymptotic for the number of number fields for degree n.

But here’s the thing.  If we replace G by a subgroup of S_n, there need not be a universal mass formula anymore.  Kedlaya (and Daniel Gulotta, in the appendix) show lots of examples.  The simplest example is the dihedral group of order 8.

All is not lost, though!  Wood showed in 2008 that you could fix this problem by replacing the discriminant of a D_4-extension with a different invariant.  Namely:  a D_4 quartic field M has a quadratic subextension L.  If you replace Disc(L/Q) with Disc(L/Q) times the norm to Q of Disc(L/M), you get a different invariant of M — an example of what Silas calls a “weighted discriminant” — and when you compute the local mass according to {\em this} invariant, you get a polynomial in p^{-1} again!

So maybe Wood’s modified discriminant, not the usual discriminant, is the “right” way to count dihedral quartics?  Does the product of her local masses give the right asymptotic for the number of D_4 extensions with Woodscriminant at most B?

It’s not at all clear to me how, if at all, you can cook up a modified discriminant for an arbitrary group G that has a universal mass formula.  What Silas shows is that having a mass formula is indeed special; when G is a p-group, there are only finitely many weighted discriminants that have one.  Silas thinks, and so do I, that this is actually true for every finite group G, and that some version of his approach will eventually prove this.  And he classifies all such weighted discriminants for groups of size up to 12; for any individual G, it’s a computation which can be made nicely algorithmic.  Very cool!

 

 

 

 

Y. Zhao and the Roberts conjecture over function fields

Before the developments of the last few years the only thing that was known about the Cohen-Lenstra conjecture was what had already been known before the Cohen-Lenstra conjecture; namely, that the number of cubic fields of discriminant between -X and X could be expressed as

.

It isn’t hard to go back and forth between the count of cubic fields and the average size of the 3-torsion part of the class group of quadratic fields, which gives the connection with Cohen-Lenstra in its usual form.

Anyway, Datskovsky and Wright showed that the asymptotic above holds (for suitable values of 12) over any global field of characteristic at least 5.  That is:  for such a field K, you let N_K(X) be the number of cubic extensions of K whose discriminant has norm at most X; then

for some explicit rational constant $c_K$.

One interesting feature of this theorem is that, if it weren’t a theorem, you might doubt it was true!  Because the agreement with data is pretty poor.  That’s because the convergence to the Davenport-Heilbronn limit is extremely slow; even if you let your discriminant range up to ten million or so, you still see substantially fewer cubic fields than you’re supposed to.

In 2000, David Roberts massively clarified the situation, formulating a conjectural refinement of the Davenport-Heilbronn theorem motivated by the Shintani zeta functions:

with c an explicit (negative) constant.  The secondary term with an exponent very close to 1 explains the slow convergence to the Davenport-Heilbronn estimate.

The Datskovsky-Wright argument works over an arbitrary global field but, like most arguments that work over both number fields and function fields, it is not very geometric.  I asked my Ph.D. student Yongqiang Zhao, who’s finishing this year, to revisit the question of counting cubic extensions of a function field F_q(t) from a more geometric point of view to see if he could get results towards the Roberts conjecture.  And he did!  Which is what I want to tell you about.

But while Zhao was writing his thesis, there was a big development — the Roberts conjecture was proved.  Not only that — it was proved twice!  Once by Bhargava, Shankar, and Tsimerman, and once by Thorne and Taniguchi, independently, simultaneously, and using very different methods.  It is certainly plausible that these methods can give the Roberts conjecture over function fields, but at the moment, they don’t.

Neither does Zhao, yet — but he’s almost there, getting

for all rational function fields K = F_q(t) of characteristic at least 5.  And his approach illuminates the geometry of the situation in a very beautiful way, which I think sheds light on how things work in the number field case.

Geometrically speaking, to count cubic extensions of F_q(t) is to count trigonal curves over F_q.  And the moduli space of trigonal curves has a classical unirational parametrization, which I learned from Mike Roth many years ago:  given a trigonal curve Y, you push forward the structure sheaf along the degree-3 map to P^1, yielding a rank-3 vector bundle on P^1; you mod out by the natural copy of the structure sheaf; and you end up with a rank-2 vector bundle W on P^1, whose projectivization is a rational surface in which Y embeds.  This rational surface is a Hirzebruch surface F_k, where k is an integer determined by the isomorphism class of the vector bundle W.  (This story is the geometric version of the Delone-Fadeev parametrization of cubic rings by binary cubic forms.)

This point of view replaces a problem of counting isomorphism classes of curves (hard!) with a problem of counting divisors in surfaces (not easy, but easier.)  It’s not hard to figure out what linear system on F_k contains Y.  Counting divisors in a linear system is nothing but a dimension count, but you have to be careful — in this problem, you only want to count smooth members.  That’s a substantially more delicate problem.  Counting all the divisors is more or less the problem of counting all cubic rings; that problem, as the number theorists have long known, is much easier than the problem of counting just the maximal orders in cubic fields.

Already, the geometric meaning of the negative secondary term becomes quite clear; it turns out that when k is big enough (i.e. if the Hirzebruch surface is twisty enough) then the corresponding linear system has no smooth, or even irreducible, members!  So what “ought” to be a sum over all k is rudely truncated; and it turns out that the sum over larger k that “should have been there” is on order X^{5/6}.

So how do you count the smooth members of a linear system?  When the linear system is highly ample, this is precisely the subject of Poonen’s well-known “Bertini theorem over finite fields.”  But the trigonal linear systems aren’t like that; they’re only “semi-ample,” because their intersection with the fiber of projection F_k -> P^1 is fixed at 3.  Zhao shows that, just as in Poonen’s case, the probability that a member of such a system is smooth converges to a limit as the linear system gets more complicated; only this limit is computed, not as a product over points P of the probability D is smooth at P, but rather a product over fibers F of the probability that D is smooth along F.  (This same insight, arrived at independently, is central to the paper of Erman and Wood I mentioned last week.)

This alone is enough for Zhao to get a version of Davenport-Heilbronn over F_q(t) with error term O(X^{7/8}), better than anything that was known for number fields prior to last year.  How he gets even closer to Roberts is too involved to go into on the blog, but it’s the best part, and it’s where the algebraic geometry really starts; the main idea is a very careful analysis of what happens when you take a singular curve on a Hirzebruch surface and start carrying out elementary transforms at the singular points, making your curve more smooth but also changing which Hirzebruch surface it’s on!

To what extent is Zhao’s method analogous to the existing proofs of the Roberts conjecture over Q?  I’m not sure; though Zhao, together with the five authors of the two papers I mentioned, spent a week huddling at AIM thinking about this, and they can comment if they want.

I’ll just keep saying what I always say:  if a problem in arithmetic statistics over Q is interesting, there is almost certainly interesting algebraic geometry in the analogous problem over F_q(t), and the algebraic geometry is liable in turn to offer some insights into the original question.

Slides from my JMM talk, “How to Count With Topology”

Back from San Diego, recovering from the redeye.  It was a terrific Joint Math Meetings this year; I saw lots of old friends and great talks, but had to miss a lot of both, too.

A couple of people asked me for the slides of my talk, “How To Count with Topology.”  Here they are, in .pdf:

How To Count With Topology

If you find this stuff interesting, these blog posts give a somewhat more detailed sketch of the papers with Venkatesh and Westerland I talked about.

Homological Stability for Hurwitz spaces and the Cohen-Lenstra conjecture over function fields, II

Akshay Venkatesh, Craig Westerland, and I, recently posted a new paper, “Homological Stability for Hurwitz spaces and the Cohen-Lenstra conjecture over function fields, II.” The paper is a sequel to our 2009 paper of the same title, except for the “II.”  It’s something we’ve been working on for a long time, and after giving a lot of talks about this material it’s very pleasant to be able to show it to people at last!

The main theorem of the new paper is that a version of the Cohen-Lenstra conjecture over F_q(t) is true.  (See my blog entry about the earlier paper for a short description of Cohen-Lenstra.)

For instance, one can ask: what is the average size of the 5-torsion subgoup of a hyperelliptic curve over F_q? That is, what is the value of

where C ranges over hyperelliptic curves of the form y^2 = f(x), f squarefree of degree n?

We show that, for q large enough and not congruent to 1 mod 5, this limit exists and is equal to 2, exactly as Cohen and Lenstra predict. Our previous paper proved that the lim sup and lim inf existed, but didn’t pin down what they were.

In fact, the Cohen-Lenstra conjectures predict more than just the average size of the group as n gets large; they propose a the isomorphism class of the group settles into a limiting distribution, and they say what this distribution is supposed to be! Another way to say this is that the Cohen-Lenstra conjecture predicts that, for each abelian p-group A, the average number of surjections from to A approaches 1. There are, in a sense, the “moments” of the Cohen-Lenstra distribution on isomorphism classes of finite abelian p-groups.

We prove that this, too, is the case for sufficiently large q not congruent to 1 mod p — but, it must be conceded, the value of “sufficiently large” depends on A. So there is still no q for which all the moments are known to agree with the Cohen-Lenstra predictions. That’s why I call what we prove a “version” of the Cohen-Lenstra conjectures. If you think of the Cohen-Lenstra conjecture as being about moments, we’re almost there — but if you think of it as being about probability distributions, we haven’t started!

Naturally, we prefer the former point of view.

This paper ended up being a little long, so I think I’ll make several blog posts about what’s in there, maybe not all in a row.