English

Heuristics for the arithmetic of elliptic curves

Number Theory 2017-12-04 v2 Algebraic Geometry

Abstract

This is an introduction to a probabilistic model for the arithmetic of elliptic curves, a model developed in a series of articles of the author with Bhargava, Kane, Lenstra, Park, Rains, Voight, and Wood. We discuss the theoretical evidence for the model, and we make predictions about elliptic curves based on corresponding theorems proved about the model. In particular, the model suggests that all but finitely many elliptic curves over Q\mathbb{Q} have rank 21\le 21, which would imply that the rank is uniformly bounded.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.10112,
  title  = {Heuristics for the arithmetic of elliptic curves},
  author = {Bjorn Poonen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.10112},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

13 pages; submitted to the Proceedings of the 2018 ICM. Version 2 adds some references and corrects some typos