Elliptic curves for high school students

I had to give a talk to high school students about some mathematical notion: I decided to tell them something about elliptic curves, but not the usual speech about cryptography, finite fields and the group law on a cubic curve…

Instead, I talked about the perhaps less known appearances of elliptic functions as solutions of classical ODEs (even if I don’t really know much about these myself). The simplest mechanical system whose motion is governed by an elliptic curve is the pendulum: the reason for this is that the ODE which classically describes the time evolution of the angle of the pendulum is best rewritten in terms of the altitude of the pendulum: the law of energy conservation is then written as

where 0 and 2l are the extremal values of the altitude , is the highest altitude which can be reached with a given energy (even if , which corresponds to the pendulum make full rotations around its axis), and is the vertical momentum of the pendulum.

In this setting, there are classical Hamilton relations , , so the differential form turns out to be the canonical non-vanishing abelian differential on the elliptic curve. This explains why the period of the pendulum is an elliptic integral, which can be calculed by an arithmetic-geometric mean, and why the position of the pendulum at can be deduced from its position at times and by the classical secant-tangent law.

The notes for the talk (in French) are available here.

Schemes in algebraic geometry 3 : glued schemes and sheaves

André Weil was among the first ones to point out the importance of having a local description of varieties, especially projective spaces, which can always locally be described as an affine space with completion by a hyperplane at infinity, and projective varieties, which similarly look like varieties in affine space. The use of sheaves in local description of spaces was magnified by Cartan and Serre, in the context of complex analytic spaces, and generalised to the algebraic setting by Serre in Faisceaux algébriques cohérents.

The projective space is the simplest example of an algebro-geometric object which cannot be described by the prime spectrum or the functor of points of a ring. For example, there is no obvious ring whose ideals describe varieties in projective space, which come from homogeneous equations. We would like to give a correct definition of gluing affine lines (with coordinates and ) to define the projective line as the gluing of with given by . For functors of points, the latest article by Alain Connes and Caterina Consani, gives a definition. For prime spectra, one has to be aware that gluing only topological spaces do not give meaningful information on algebraic properties. This is illustrated by the case of differentiable manifolds, which are not the same as topological manifolds: gluing differentiable manifolds has to induce a correspondance between differentiable functions (this is equivalent to the requirement that gluing maps between charts be differentiable).

Schemes in algebraic geometry 2 : prime spectra and generic points

I just explained how the affine plane could be described by the ring . A point M of the affine plane whose coordinate ring is R is a morphism defined by the assignment , where are the coordinates of M. In the case of points corresponding to morphisms , there is a natural way of recovering the point from the ring morphism by looking at his equations, which are elements of the kernel of the morphism. If M satisfies the equations and , then M has the form . This motivates the abstract definition of point of the affine plane as a morphism to some ring.

Conversely, the set of equations of M defines a canonically associated point , which is the morphism , where is the ideal generated by the equations. But this morphism has no reason to totally recover M if it wasn’t a point with integral coordinates. For example, the point is a special point, satisfying a lot of equations, which characterize it. But do not satisfy any polynomial equations with integral coefficients, so the set of its equations is empty, and cannot be used to recover it. Moreover, the point does not satisfy equations either: their algebraic properties are exactly the same. These points are called generic.

The prime spectrum of a ring is a convenient way of describing equivalence classes of points of a given ring.
Definition. The prime spectrum of is the set of points for prime ideals . If is any point of the affine plane with coordinates in an integral domain , then Mis canonically associated to some , where is the kernel of the map .

Schemes in algebraic geometry I : the affine plane

I think most people blogging around algebraic geometry eventually write about schemes, (as in Rigorous trivialities or algebraic stacks (in the Secret Blogging Seminar), which are traditionnally seen as the main reason (not) to study algebraic geometry today. My turn now. I recommend Igor Dolgacev’s lectures which is one of my favorite ways of speaking of schemes.

Interesting mathematics come up when algebraic varieties (things defined by several polynomial equations) are no longer defined as mere sets (sets of tuples of numbers satisfying the equation) but mope complex mathematical objects. Differential geometry, for example, gives the structure of a complex manifold to algebraic varieties in , which is still an efficient way of proving theorems. However, during the 20th century, a lot of mathematicians tried to develop a new structure which would avoid the use of analysis to concentrate on the algebraic aspects (I don’t know exaclty who, but expect Hilbert, Zariski, Chevalley, Grothendieck to have played a role). Grothendieck approach using category theory and functors of points is now widely used and is a very impressive way of tying together intuition, commutative algebra, and geometry.

There are many ways of reverse engineering Grothendieck’s definition of a scheme (see EGA1 if you want to know how this is related to Chevalley’s definition of a scheme). The first thing to say is probably what properties and notions are needed for schemes:

Monads in mathematics 4 : the bar and cobar constructions

The use of monads and comonads in homological algebra is as old as the theory: Godement’s standard construction refers to the use of monads in cohomology theory, and is said to be the first study of a general method for constructing acyclic resolutions. Later the theory was explored in greater depth by Eilenberg, Moore, Barr, Beck. The term bar resolution is now most commonly used to describe the process. Monads derived from operads were also studied by Lawvere, Mitchell, Bénabou, under the name of algebraic theories, with aim towards topoi and logic.

Bar resolutions (see J. Baez website and the LNM Seminar on Triples and Categorical Homology Theory) are a way to canonically (i.e. functorially) describe an arbitrary algebra over a monad using only free algebras. It is a particular case of definition with generators and relations which is often the only way to describe infinite mathematical objects with finite expressions (computer algebra systems usually deal with finitely generated objects, and use generators and relations to describe their elements), but bar resolutions somehow are the universal way of doing this.

Most cohomology theories fit in the framework of bar constructions, though in various apparently unrelated ways. However, a visible common denominator of most constructions is the use of simplicial methods. This makes them of some use in homotopical algebra: bar resolutions are used to define canonical cofibrant resolutions of objects, which explains their uses in definition of derived functors.

Experimental algebraic geometry I : the grassmannian

I just began playing with Macaulay 2 to see how it could help doing algebraic geometry without manual tedious computations. Let’s try with the grassmannian: fortunately, the program comes with lots of pre-written functions, including the generation of Grassmanians.

Macaulay provides a command-line interface using the readline library (like many other command-line programs) : here is what input/output looks like

i1 : V = Grassmannian(1,3)
o1 = ideal(p   p    - p   p    + p   p   )
            1,2 0,3    0,2 1,3    0,1 2,3
o1 : Ideal of ZZ[p   , p   , p   , p   , p   , p   ]
                  0,1   0,2   1,2   0,3   1,3   2,3

When I type a command at i1, I get an output o1 with a value and a type: this output is an ideal of the ring . Many features of the Grassmannian as an algebraic variety are available: first define

i1 : V = Grassmannian(1,3,CoefficientRing => QQ);
o1 : Ideal of QQ[p   , p   , p   , p   , p   , p   ]
                  0,1   0,2   1,2   0,3   1,3   2,3
i2 : X = Proj(ring V / V)
o2 = X
o2 : ProjectiveVariety

the projective variety X over defined by the homogeneous ideal V : here ring V denotes the ambient ring of V. We see that is a non-singular quadric in 5-dimensional projective space, and check several well-known facts

Lines in space and the Grassmann variety

This is an English version of my previous post. Schubert calculus is a collection of techniques and formulae used for computations of enumerative, numerical properties of common objects in linear algebra (there are very nice books by William Fulton covering the subject). The example of the set of lines in three-dimensional space is commonly chosen to illustrate the kind of results which are obtained by Schubert calculus: the reason is probably that it is the simplest non trivial situation.

A line in affine space would usually by defined by its direction (which is a line in a vector space, and depends on two parameters: imagine parameterising it by a vector on a sphere), and its position, depending on two more parameters, for a given direction (think of the possible translations of a given line). Thus the set of lines might be parameterised by four parameters, and more precisely one can show that it has dimension four. Even more interestingly, two parallel planes define for almost every line a unique pair of intersection points (one on each plane) which enables us to recover the line. This means lines are (almost all) parameterised by four coordinates, by means of rational functions (well, we still have to explain what is parameterised: for example, we could say that the slope, direction of the line and its position are rational functions of the coordinates on the two planes). The resulting parameterisation is somewhat bijective, but a few lines are missing (for example, lines parallel to the plane): however, we say the set of lines is a rational variety: which means the parameterisation is essentially bijective, and the missing elements can be obtained by taking limits.

The Plücker embedding

To avoid tiring case disjunctions, it is very nice to extend the theory to the set of lines in projective space. They can be defined by their Plücker coordinates : given a line in space, we choose two points, given by projective (a.k.a. barycentric) coordinates and . Then we define the Plücker coordinates of the line by the six numbers . The fundamental properties of these coordinates is their invariance under changing the choice of points. Any other pair of points would be given by barycentres of M and N (with weights and ), giving new coordinates


which are actually proportional to the old coordinates. These coordinates, as projective coordinates, are thus uniquely defined (and even allow to recover the line). The set of lines now appears as a subvariety of a projective space called the Grassmann variety of lines in 3-space.

Les droites de l’espace et la grassmannienne

Le calcul de Schubert désigne un ensemble de techniques destinées à calculer les propriétés énumératives, ou numériques, d’objets communs de l’algèbre linéaire (voir notamment les excellents ouvrages de William Fulton à ce propos). L’exemple traditionnellement choisi, et probablement le plus simple, concerne l’ensemble des droites de l’espace (à 3 dimensions).

Une droite de l’espace est habituellement repérée par sa direction (qui est une droite vectorielle, et dépend donc de deux paramètres, et sa position, qui dépend de deux paramètres supplémentaires (à direction fixée). L’ensemble des droites peut donc être paramétré par quatre paramètres, on peut montrer qu’il est de dimension quatre. Plus intéressant encore, si on place dans l’espace deux plans parallèles, presque toutes les droites peuvent être décrites (de manière unique) par leurs points d’intersection avec ces plans : on obtient ainsi une description par 4 fractions rationnelles (à supposer qu’on sache ce qu’on est en train de paramétrer, ce qui sera plus clair dans une seconde). Ce paramétrage est à peu de chose près bijectif (il manque les droites un peu particulières) : on dit que l’ensemble des droites forme une variété rationnelle.

Le plongement de Plücker

Pour éviter de fastidieuses études de cas, on s’intéresse également aux droites de l’espace projectif : on peut les repérer par les coordonnées de Plücker. Étant donnée une droite de l’espace, considérons deux points sur cette droite de coordonnées projectives et . Les coordonnées de Plücker de la droite sont, par définition, les 6 nombres . Si on avait choisi d’autres points (qui seraient donc des barycentres de M et N), on aurait obtenu des nombres de la forme

qui sont en fait proportionnels à ceux calculés avec M et N. Les droites sont donc naturellement paramétrées par des coordonnées projectives et forment la variété grassmannienne des droites de l’espace.

Intégrales elliptiques et moyenne arithmético-géométrique

Le calcul de la moyenne arithmético-géométrique est un algorithme simple et très puissant découvert par Gauss permettant de calculer les intégrales elliptiques. L’excellent article de David Cox [1] dans L’enseignement mathématique expose l’historique des découvertes et recherches de Gauss sur le sujet.

La moyenne arithmético-géométrique a été définie par Lagrange, et est calculée de la manière suivante : si a et b sont deux réels positifs, on définit leur moyenne géométrique et leur moyenne arithmétique . Il est bien connu que , et on a

Cette relation permet de montrer que si on définit des suites et telles que et sont les moyennes arithmétique et géométrique de et , ces suites convergent vers une même limite, notée , la moyenne arithmético-géométrique.

Gauss remarqua à l’aide d’un changement de variable (très) astucieux que l’intégrale

restait invariante en remplaçant a et b par leurs moyennes arithmétique et géométrique. Il en déduit la valeur . Il montra aussi que la longueur d’un quart de lemniscate de Bernoulli est .
On sait également qu’il relia ces propriétés à celles des fonctions thêta.