Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2012
We prove that under any projective embedding of an abelian variety A of dimension g, a complete set of addition laws has cardinality at least g+1, generalizing a result of Bosma and Lenstra for the Weierstrass model of an elliptic curve in ℙ2. In contrast, we prove, moreover, that if k is any field with infinite absolute Galois group, then there exists for every abelian variety A/k a projective embedding and an addition law defined for every pair of k-rational points. For an abelian variety of dimension 1 or 2, we show that this embedding can be the classical Weierstrass model or the embedding in ℙ15, respectively, up to a finite number of counterexamples for ∣k∣≤5 .