English

Supercongruences using modular forms

Number Theory 2025-06-17 v3 Algebraic Geometry

Abstract

Many generating series of combinatorially interesting numbers have the property that the sum of the terms of order <p<p at some suitable point is congruent to a zero of a zeta-function modulo infinitely many primes pp. Surprisingly, very often these congruences turn out to hold modulo p2p^2 or even p3p^3. We call such congruences supercongruences and in the past 15 years an abundance of them have been discovered. In this paper we show that a large proportion of them can be explained by the use of modular functions and forms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.03301,
  title  = {Supercongruences using modular forms},
  author = {Frits Beukers},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.03301},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

36 pages, this is an updated version. Several references have been added. We also improved the presentation significantly and extended our results to modular groups which are Atkin-Lehner extensions. We tried not to change the numbering of Theorems, lemmas, etc. The only changes are the numbers 1.24 and beyond in the introduction of the first version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:10:21.231Z