English

Counting elliptic curves over $\mathbb{Q}$ with bounded naive height

Number Theory 2025-06-24 v1 Algebraic Geometry

Abstract

In this paper, we give exact and asymptotic formulas for counting elliptic curves EA,B ⁣:y2=x3+Ax+B E_{A,B} \colon y^2 = x^3 + Ax + B with A,BZ A, B \in \mathbb{Z} , ordered by naive height. We study the family of all such curves and also several natural subfamilies, including those with fixed j j -invariant and those with complex multiplication (CM). In particular, we provide formulas for two commonly used normalizations of the naive height appearing in the literature: the calibrated naive height, defined by Hcal(EA,B):=max{4A3,27B2}, H^{\mathrm{cal}}(E_{A,B}) := \max\{ 4|A|^3, 27B^2 \}, and the uncalibrated naive height, defined by Hncal(EA,B):=max{A3,B2}. H^{\mathrm{ncal}}(E_{A,B}) := \max\{ |A|^3, B^2 \}. In fact, we prove our theorems with respect to the more general naive height Hα,β(EA,B):=max{αA3,βB2}H_{\alpha, \beta}(E_{A,B}) := \max\{ \alpha |A|^3, \beta B^2 \}, defined for arbitrary positive real numbers α,βR>0\alpha, \beta \in \mathbb{R}_{> 0}. As part of our approach, we give a completely explicit parametrization of the set of curves EA,B E_{A,B} with fixed j j -invariant and bounded naive height, describing them as twists of the curve EAj,Bj E_{A_j, B_j} of minimal naive height for the given j j -invariant. We also include tables comparing and verifying our theoretical predictions with exact counts obtained via exhaustive computer searches, and we compute data for CM elliptic curves of naive height up to 1030 10^{30} . Code in SageMath is provided to compute all exact and asymptotic formulas appearing in the paper.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.18874,
  title  = {Counting elliptic curves over $\mathbb{Q}$ with bounded naive height},
  author = {Adrian Barquero-Sanchez and Daniel Mora-Mora},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.18874},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

27 pages, 6 tables, 1 figure; code available on GitHub to reproduce all computations

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:29:54.516Z