Thursday, 19 November 2009

nt.number theory - Can you get Siegel's theorem "for free" from modularity and Mazur's Eisenstein Ideal paper?

There is a well-known theorem of Shafarevich that given a finite set $S$ of primes the number of isomorphism classes of elliptic curves over $Bbb Q$ with everywhere good reduction outside $S$ is finite.



One way to prove this, which Cremona and Lingham use here to compute all such curves, is to use Siegel's theorem that an elliptic curve over $Q$ has only a finite number of $S$-integral points.



Here's a proof with overkill:



Given $S$ there are a finite number of possible conductors $N$ for elliptic curves with everywhere good reduction outside $S$. They must all be divisors of $2^8 3^5 d^2$ where $d$ is the product of those primes in $S$ different from 2 and 3.



The corresponding spaces $S_2(Gamma_0(N))$ of cuspforms for each of our finite list of $N$ is finite dimensional.



By the modularity theorem, there is hence finite number isogeny classes of elliptic curves with everywhere good reduction outside $S$.



By Mazur's Modular Curves and the Eisenstein Ideal there are only a finite number of isomorphism classes of elliptic curves in a given isogeny class.




Question 1: Does any of this machinery rely on Siegel's theorem?



Question 2: If the answer to question 1 is no, can this proof of Shafarevich's theorem be "cheaply extended" to deduce Siegel's Theorem from these seemingly unrelated powerful results?




By "cheaply extended" I mean without the use of techniques with the diophantine flavor of Baker's theory of linear forms in logarithms.

No comments:

Post a Comment