We improve Kolyvagin’s upper bound on the order of the p-primary part of the Shafarevich–Tate group of an elliptic curve of rank one over a quadratic imaginary field. In many cases, our bound is precisely that predicted by the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjectural formula.

Let ϕ be a Drinfeld module of rank 2 over the field of rational functions , with . Let K be a fixed imaginary quadratic field over F and d a positive integer. For each prime of good reduction for ϕ, let be a root of the characteristic polynomial of the Frobenius endomorphism of ϕ over the finite field . Let Πϕ(K;d) be the number of primes of degree d such that the field extension is the fixed imaginary quadratic field K. We present upper bounds for Πϕ(K;d) obtained by two different approaches, inspired by similar ones for elliptic curves. The first approach, inspired by the work of Serre, is to consider the image of Frobenius in a mixed Galois representation associated to K and to the Drinfeld module ϕ. The second approach, inspired by the work of Cojocaru, Fouvry and Murty, is based on an application of the square sieve. The bounds obtained with the first method are better, but depend on the fixed quadratic imaginary field K. In our application of the second approach, we improve the results of Cojocaru, Murty and Fouvry by considering projective Galois representations.

Let k be an algebraically closed field of positive characteristic p. We consider which finite groups G have the property that every faithful action of G on a connected smooth projective curve over k lifts to characteristic zero. Oort conjectured that cyclic groups have this property. We show that if a cyclic-by-p group G has this property, then G must be either cyclic or dihedral, with the exception of A4 in characteristic two. This proves one direction of a strong form of the Oort conjecture.

We develop the theory of p-adic confluence of q-difference equations. The main result is the fact that, in the p-adic framework, a function is a (Taylor) solution of a differential equation if and only if it is a solution of a q-difference equation. This fact implies an equivalence, called confluence, between the category of differential equations and those of q-difference equations. We develop this theory by introducing a category of sheaves on the disk D−(1,1), for which the stalk at 1 is a differential equation, the stalk at q isa q-difference equation if q is not a root of unity, and the stalk at a root of unity ξ is a mixed object, formed by a differential equation and an action of σξ.

Let n=2,3,4,5 and let X be a smooth complex projective hypersurface of . In this paper we find an effective lower bound for the degree of X, such that every holomorphic entire curve in X must satisfy an algebraic differential equation of order k=n=dim X, and also similar bounds for order k>n. Moreover, for every integer n≥2, we show that there are no such algebraic differential equations of order k<n for a smooth hypersurface in .

We describe an algorithm for computing parameter-test-ideals in certain local Cohen–Macaulay rings. The algorithm is based on the study of a Frobenius map on the injective hull of the residue field of the ring and on the application of Sharp’s notion of ‘special ideals’. Our techniques also provide an algorithm for computing indices of nilpotency of Frobenius actions on top local cohomology modules of the ring and on the injective hull of its residue field. The study of nilpotent elements on injective hulls of residue fields also yields a great simplification of the proof of the celebrated result in the article Generators of D-modules in positive characteristic (J. Alvarez-Montaner, M. Blickle and G. Lyubeznik, Math. Res. Lett. 12 (2005), 459–473).

We continue the study, begun in [F. Russo, Varieties with quadratic entry locus. I, Preprint (2006), math. AG/0701889] , of secant defective manifolds having ‘simple entry loci’. We prove that such manifolds are rational and describe them in terms of tangential projections. Using also the work of [P. Ionescu and F. Russo, Conic-connected manifolds, Preprint (2006), math. AG/0701885], their classification is reduced to the case of Fano manifolds of high index, whose Picard group is generated by the hyperplane section class. Conjecturally, the former should be linear sections of rational homogeneous manifolds. We also provide evidence that the classification of linearly normal dual defective manifolds with Picard group generated by the hyperplane section should follow along the same lines.

The Nagata automorphism is a kind of complicated automorphism on the affine 3-space . For a long time, it remained unknown whether or not the Nagata automorphism is tame until Shestakov and Umirbaev at last proved that it is not tame in 2004, by purely algebraic methods (e.g. Poisson algebra). In this paper, we consider a certain necessary condition for a given automorphism on to be tame from the point of view of the Sarkisov program established by Corti. Furthermore, by using it, we shall give a new algebro-geometric proof of the non-tameness of the Nagata automorphism.

The description of irreducible representations of a group G can be seen as a problem in harmonic analysis; namely, decomposing a suitable space of functions on G into irreducibles for the action of G×G by left and right multiplication. For a split p-adic reductive group G over a local non-archimedean field, unramified irreducible smooth representations are in bijection with semisimple conjugacy classes in the ‘Langlands dual’ group. We generalize this description to an arbitrary spherical variety X of G as follows. Irreducible unramified quotients of the space are in natural ‘almost bijection’ with a number of copies of AX*/WX, the quotient of a complex torus by the ‘little Weyl group’ of X. This leads to a description of the Hecke module of unramified vectors (a weak analog of geometric results of Gaitsgory and Nadler), and an understanding of the phenomenon that representations ‘distinguished’ by certain subgroups are functorial lifts. In the course of the proof, rationality properties of spherical varieties are examined and a new interpretation is given for the action, defined by Knop, of the Weyl group on the set of Borel orbits.

Given a Lie n-algebra, we provide an explicit construction of its integrating Lie n-group. This extends work done by Getzler in the case of nilpotent -algebras. When applied to an ordinary Lie algebra, our construction yields the simplicial classifying space of the corresponding simply connected Lie group. In the case of the string Lie 2-algebra of Baez and Crans, we obtain the simplicial nerve of their model of the string group.

We define an invariant of welded virtual knots from each finite crossed module by considering crossed module invariants of ribbon knotted surfaces which are naturally associated with them. We elucidate that the invariants obtained are non-trivial by calculating explicit examples. We define welded virtual graphs and consider invariants of them defined in a similar way.