Sunday, July 24, 2016

A motivic product formula

The classical product formula for number fields is a fundamental tool in arithmetic. In 1993, Pierre Colmez published a truly inspired generalization of this to the case of Grothendieck's motives. In turn, this spring Urs Hartl and Rajneesh Kumar Singh put an equally inspired manuscript on the arXiv devoted to translating Colmez into the theory of Drinfeld modules and the like. Underneath the mountains of terminology there is a fantastic similarity between these two beautiful papers and I have created a blog to bring this to the attention of the community. Please see:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwCbLZazAtweamZYckpaTy15cFU

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

What is a functional equation?

Like all number theorists I am fascinated (to say the least) with the functional equation of 
classical  L-series. Years ago, I came up with a simple characterization of functional equations basically using only complex conjugation. This point being that, via a canonical change of variables (going back to Riemann), such L-series are, up to a nonzero scalar, given by real power series with the expectation that the zeroes are also real. In characteristic p the best one can hope is also that the zeroes will be as rational as the coefficients (though this statement needs to be modified to take care of standard factorizations as well as the great generality of Drinfeld's base rings A).

For those interested, a two page pdf can be found at the following link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwCbLZazAtweTmNIa1ZSc0h2UEE

Saturday, March 26, 2016

An indirect consequence of the famous Lucas congruence...

So, in the course of function field arithmetic, one runs into the binomial coefficients (like one does most everywhere in mathematics); or rather the coefficients modulo a prime p. The primary result about binomial coefficients modulo p is of course the congruence of Lucas. In function field arithmetic
one seems to be unable to avoid the group obtained by permuting p-adic (or q-adic) coefficients of a number. I recently discovered a congruence using these permutations and the product of two binomial coefficients that I decided to blog about. The proof is an indirect consequence of Lucas and is perhaps more interesting than the result itself. One is then led to look for something related with the Carlitz polynomials, which are the function field analog of the binomial coefficients.

I put all of this into a three page pdf which, if you are interested, you can find here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwCbLZazAtweN293bkxwYUZEYVk/view?usp=sharing