English

Counting sums of two powers

Algebraic Geometry 2025-07-14 v1

Abstract

We generalize two well-known enumerative facts. The first, due to Clebsch, says that a general binary sextic form is expressible as the sum of a cube and a square in 40 different ways. The second, due to Zariski and later Vakil, states that a general pencil of binary 12-ics contains exactly 3762 cubes plus squares, ignoring scaling.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.08337,
  title  = {Counting sums of two powers},
  author = {Anand Patel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.08337},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:56:04.370Z