Number Theory

In 1909, Thue proved that when $F(x,y)$ is an irreducible, homogeneous, polynomial with integer coefficients and degree at least 3, the inequality $\left\| F(x,y) \right\| \leq h$ has finitely many integer-pair solutions for any positive $h$.  Because of this result, the inequality $\left\| F(x,y) \right\| \leq h$  is known as Thue’s Inequality.  Much work has been done to find sharp bounds on the size and number of integer-pair solutions to Thue’s Inequality, with Mueller and Schmidt initiating the modern approach to this problem in the 1980s.  In this talk, I will describe different techniques used by Akhtari and Bengoechea; Baker; Mueller and Schmidt; Saradha and Sharma; and Thomas to make progress on this general problem.  After that, I will discuss some improvements that can be made to a counting technique used in association with “the gap principle” and how those improvements lead to better bounds on the number of solutions to Thue’s Inequality.

Fix $N\geq 1$ and let $L_1, L_2, \ldots, L_N$ be Dirichlet L-functions with distinct, primitive and even Dirichlet characters. We assume that these functions satisfy the same functional equation. Let $F(s)∶= c_1L_1(s)+c_2L_2(s)+\ldots+c_NL_N(s)$ be a linear combination of these functions ($c_j \in\mathbb{R}^*$ are distinct). $F$ is known to have two kinds of zeros: trivial ones, and non-trivial zeros which are confined in a vertical strip. We denote the number of non-trivial zeros $\rho$ with $\mathfrak{I}(\rho)\leq T$ by $N(T)$, and we let $N_\theta(T)$ be the number of these zeros that are on the critical line. At the end of the 90's, Selberg proved that this linear combination had a positive proportion of zeros on the critical line, by showing that $\kappa F∶=\lim \inf T (N_\theta(2T)−N_\theta(T))/(N(2T)−N(T))\geq c/N^2$ for some $c>0$. Our goal is to provide an explicit value for $c$, and also to improve the lower bound above by showing that $\kappa_F \geq 2.16\times 10^{-6}/(N \log N)$, for any large enough $N$.

I will discuss the fourth moment of quadratic Dirichlet L-functions where we prove an asymptotic formula with four main terms unconditionally. Previously, the asymptotic formula was established with the leading main term under generalized Riemann hypothesis. This work is based on Li's recent work on the second moment of quadratic twists of modular L-functions. It is joint work with Joshua Stucky.

An orthogonal array with parameters \((N,n,q,t)\) (\(OA(N,n,q,t)\) for short) is an \(N\times n\) matrix with entries from the alphabet \(\{1,2,...,q\}\) such that in any of its \(t\) columns, all possible row vectors of length \(t\) occur equally often. Rao showed the following lower bound on \(N\) for \(OA(N,n,q,2e)\):
\[ N\geq \sum_{k=0}^e \binom{n}{k}(q-1)^k, \]
and an orthogonal array is said to be complete or tight if it achieves equality in this bound. It is known by Delsarte (1973) that for complete orthogonal arrays \(OA(N,n,q,2e)\), the number of Hamming distances between distinct two rows is \(e\). One of the classical problems is to classify complete orthogonal arrays.

We call an orthogonal array \(OA(N,n,q,2e-1)\) extremal if the number of Hamming distances between distinct two rows is \(e\). In this talk, we review the classification problem of complete orthogonal arrays with our contribution to the case \(t=4\) and show how to extend it to extremal orthogonal arrays. Moreover, we give a result for extremal orthogonal arrays which is a counterpart of a result in block designs by Ionin and Shrikhande in 1993.

The class number one problem is one of the central subjects in algebraic number theory that turns back to the time of Gauss. This problem has led to the classical embedding problem which asks whether or not any number field $K$ can be embedded in a finite extension $L$ with class number one. Although Golod and Shafarevich gave a counterexample for the classical embedding problem, yet one may ask about the embedding in 'Polya fields', a special generalization of class number one number fields. The latter is the 'new embedding problem' investigated by Leriche in 2014. In this talk, I briefly review some well-known results in the literature on the embedding problems. Then, I will present the 'relativized' version of the new embedding problem studied in a joint work with Ali Rajaei.