Related papers: Rationality proofs by curve counting

We study the number of rational points of smooth projective curves over finite fields in some relative situations in the spirit of a previous paper from an euclidean point of vue. We prove some kinds of relative Weil bounds, derived from…

Motivated by several recent results on the geometry of the moduli spaces $\bar{\Cal M}_{g,n}$ of stable curves of genus $g$ with $n$ marked points, here we determine their birational structure for small values of $g$ and $n$ by exploiting…

In this paper we investigate complex uniruled varieties $X$ whose rational curves of minimal degree satisfy a special property. Namely, we assume that the tangent directions to such curves at a general point $x\in X$ form a linear subspace…

We bring additional support to the conjecture saying that a rational cuspidal plane curve is either free or nearly free. This conjecture was confirmed for curves of even degree, and in this note we prove it for many odd degrees. In…

We give a 'recursive' formula (in terms of reducible limits) for counting rational curves on a variety moving in any sufficiently large and well-behaved family. Our approach is completely elementary and makes no use of moduli spaces for…

We study the geometry of the space of rational curves on smooth complete intersections of low degree, which pass through a given set of points on the variety. The argument uses spreading out to a finite field, together with an adaptation to…

We find an asymptotic formula for the number of rational points near planar curves. More precisely, if $f:\mathbb{R}\rightarrow\mathbb{R}$ is a sufficiently smooth function defined on the interval $[\eta,\xi]$, then the number of rational…

The aim of these notes is to give a introduction to the ideas and techniques of handling rational curves on varieties. The main emphasis is on varieties with many rational curves which are the higher dimensional analogs of rational curves…

In [3], it is proved that the quotient of an abelian variety $A$ by a finite order automorphism $g$ is uniruled if and only if some power of $g$ satisfies a numerical condition $0<\age(g^k)<1$. In this paper, we show that $\age(g^k)=1$ is…

A variety is unirational if it is dominated by a rational variety. A variety is rationally connected if two general points can be joined by a rational curve. This paper aims to show that the two notions can cooperate and, building on…

We present some results about the number of rational points on a certain family of curves defined over a finite field. In a small number of cases the curves have more rational points than expected. Fibonacci numbers make an appearance, as…

We propose a generalization of tropical curves by dropping the rationality and integrality requirements while preserving the balancing condition. An interpretation of such curves as critical points of a certain quadratic functional allows…

Let X be an algebraic curve over Q and t a non-constant Q-rational function on X such that Q(t) is a proper subfield of Q(X). For every integer n pick a point P_n on X such that t(P_n)=n. We conjecture that, for large N, among the number…

Let X be a non-singular projective hypersurface of degree 4, which is defined over the rational numbers. Assume that X has dimension 39 or more, and that X contains a real point and p-adic points for every prime p. Then X is shown to…

In this paper, we prove a general result computing the number of rational points of bounded height on a projective variety $V$ which is covered by lines. The main technical result used to achieve this is an upper bound on the number of…

Let X be a complex-projective contact manifold whose second Betti-number is one. It has long been conjectured that X should then be rational-homogeneous, or equivalently, that there exists an embedding of X into a projective space whose…

We count the number of rational elliptic curves of bounded naive height that have a rational $N$-isogeny, for $N \in \{2,3,4,5,6,8,9,12,16,18\}$. For some $N$, this is done by generalizing a method of Harron and Snowden. For the remaining…

In this paper we obtain an explicit formula for the number of curves in a compact complex surface $X$ (passing through the right number of generic points), that has up to one node and one singularity of codimension $k$, provided the total…

For $X$ a smooth cubic threefold we study the Pl\"ucker embedding of the Fano surface of lines $S$ of $X$. We prove that if $X$ is general then the minimal gonality of a covering family of curves of $S$ is four and that this happens for a…

Elimination theory has many applications, in particular, it describes explicitly an image of a complex line under rational transformation and determines the number of common zeroes of two polynomials in one variable. We generalize classical…