Explicitly combing hedgehogs over fields of Stufe 4
Abstract
Let be the coordinate ring of the algebraic unit sphere over a field . Umberto Zannier showed that there exists a matrix in with first row for , the field of -adic numbers for an odd prime , or more generally, if is a sum of two squares in . The case remained open and was subsequently posed and discussed by Zannier with numerous researchers, thereby bringing the problem to broader attention. In 2025, Alexey Ananyevskiy and Marc Levine showed that such a matrix exists if and only if has Stufe at most , equivalently, if there exist such that . Since has Stufe , this settled Zannier's problem. Their proof is purely existential and does not provide an explicit matrix. In this note, we construct an explicit example in terms of and describe the computational techniques used to find it.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.15452,
title = {Explicitly combing hedgehogs over fields of Stufe 4},
author = {Peter Müller},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.15452},
year = {2026}
}
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10 pages