Saturday, 23 January 2010

nt.number theory - Is the ABC conjecture known to imply the Riemann hypothesis?

I am pretty sure that the answer to the question is no: no two of those big conjectures are known to imply the third. But I feel somewhat sheepish giving this as an answer: what evidence can I bring forth to support this, and if nothing, why should you believe me?



The only thing I can think of is that in the function field case, ABC and GRH are fully established, but only parts of BSD are known.



(Maybe I should also admit that I didn't know anything about the connection between ABC and bounds on Shafarevich-Tate groups of elliptic curves in terms of the conductor until I glanced just now at the paper of Goldfeld the OP linked to. The fact that you can build examples of large Sha from triples of integers with large ABC exponent is amazing to me.)



Addendum: I feel especially confident that ABC and GRH do not imply BSD, at least not the part of BSD that asserts finiteness of Shafarevich-Tate groups. The first two conjectures are essentially analytic in nature, whereas the finiteness of Sha is deeply arithmetic. It seems extremely unlikely.



Moreover, ABC is really hard, in the sense that for all of the results of the form "X implies ABC" that I've ever seen, X includes a statement which is ABC-like in the sense that it gives a uniform bound on one arithmetic quantity in terms of another. For example, ABC is known to be of a similar flavor to the Szpiro Conjecture (and implies it), but so far as I know it is only known to be implied by a more-explicitly-ABC-like Modified Szpiro Conjecture. Admittedly bounding Sha in terms of the conductor, as in Goldfeld's work, is only vaguely ABC-like, but to an arithmetic geometer like me these bounds still feel very "analytic"; I can't see any connection at all between this and BSD. So I doubt that GRH (let me say ERH, so that I more or less know what I'm talking about -- i.e., Dedekind zeta functions) plus BSD is known to imply ABC.

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