Number Theory

Historically, the notion of Pólya fields dates back to some works of George Pólya and Alexander Ostrowski, in 1919, on entire functions with integer values at integers; a number field $K$ with ring of integers $\mathcal{O}_K$ is called a Pólya field whenever the $\mathcal{O}_K$-module $\{f \in K[X] \, : \, f(\mathcal{O}_K) \subseteq \mathcal{O}_K \}$ admits an $\mathcal{O}_K$-basis with exactly one member from each degree. Pólya fields can be thought of as a generalization of number fields with class number one, and their classification of a specific degree has become recently an active research subject in algebraic number theory. In this talk, I will present some criteria for $K$ to be a Pólya field. Then I will give some results concerning Pólya fields of degrees $2$, $3$, and $6$.

For every positive integer n, the quotient ring Z/nZ is the natural ring whose additive group is cyclic. The "multiplicative group modulo n" is the group of invertible elements of this ring, with the multiplication operation. As it turns out, many quantities of interest to number theorists can be interpreted as "statistics" of these multiplicative groups. For example, the cardinality of the multiplicative group modulo n is simply the Euler phi function of n; also, the number of terms in the invariant factor composition of this group is closely related to the number of primes dividing n. Many of these statistics have known distributions when the integer n is chosen at random (the Euler phi function has a singular cumulative distribution, while the Erdös–Kac theorem tells us that the number of prime divisors follows an asymptotically normal distribution). Therefore this family of groups provides a convenient excuse for examining several famous number theory results and open problems. We shall describe how we know, given the factorization of n, the exact structure of the multiplicative group modulo n, and go on to outline the connections to these classical statistical problems in multiplicative number theory.

The Hardy and Littlewood k-tuple prime conjecture is one of the most enduring unsolved problems in mathematics. In 1999, Gadiyar and Padma presented a heuristic derivation of the 2-tuples conjecture by employing the orthogonality principle of Ramanujan sums. Building upon their work, we explore triple convolution Ramanujan sums and use this approach to provide a heuristic derivation of the Hardy-Littlewood conjecture concerning prime 3-tuples. Furthermore, we estimate the triple convolution of the Jordan totient function using Ramanujan sums.

Let $\sigma^*(n)$ be the sum of all unitary (i.e. coprime) divisors of $n$. As an analogue of Lehmer’s totient problem, Subbarao proposed the following conjecture. The congruence $\sigma^*(n)\equiv 1\pmod{n}$ is possible iff $n$ is a prime power. This problem is still open. We strengthen considerably the lower estimations for the potential counterexamples to Subbarao’s conjecture.

In the second part of our talk, we discuss the growth of the function $\sigma^*(n)$. We establish a new explicit upper bound, namely $\sigma^*(n)<1.2678n\log\log{n}$ for all $n\ge223092870$. For this purpose, we use explicit estimates for Chebyshev’s $\theta$-function and for some product defined over prime numbers.

Given an abelian variety A defined over a number field, a conjecture attributed to Serre states that the set of primes at which A admits ordinary reduction is of positive density. This conjecture had been proved for elliptic curves (Serre, 1977), abelian surfaces (Katz 1982, Sawin 2016) and certain higher dimensional abelian varieties (Pink 1983, Fite 2021, etc).

In this talk, we will discuss ideas behind these results and recent progress for abelian varieties with non-trivial endomorphisms, including the case where A has almost complex multiplication by an abelian CM field, based on joint work with Cantoral-Farfan, Mantovan, Pries, and Tang.

Apart from ordinary reduction, we will also discuss the set of primes at which an abelian variety admits basic reduction, generalizing a result of Elkies on the infinitude of supersingular primes for elliptic curves. This is joint work with Mantovan, Pries, and Tang.