Chabauty without the Mordell-Weil group

Title data

Stoll, Michael:
Chabauty without the Mordell-Weil group.
In: Böckle, Gebhard ; Decker, Wolfram ; Malle, Gunter (ed.): Algorithmic and Experimental Methods in Algebra, Geometry, and Number Theory. - Cham : Springer , 2017 . - pp. 623-663
ISBN 978-3-319-70565-1
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70566-8_28

Project information

Abstract in another language

Based on ideas from recent joint work with Bjorn Poonen, we describe an algorithm that can in certain cases determine the set of rational points on a curve C, given only the p-Selmer group S of its Jacobian (or some other abelian variety C maps to) and the image of the p-Selmer set of C in S. The method is more likely to succeed when the genus is large, which is when it is usually rather difficult to obtain generators of a finite-index subgroup of the Mordell-Weil group, which one would need to apply Chabauty’s method in the usual way. We give some applications, for example to generalized Fermat equations of the form x^5 + y^5 = z^p.