Families of irreducible polynomials of Gaussian periods and matrices of cyclotomic numbers

Given an odd prime we show a way to construct large families of polynomials , , where is a set of primes of the form mod and is the irreducible polynomial of the Gaussian periods of degree in . Examples of these families when are worked in detail. We also show, given an integer and a prime mod , how to represent by matrices the Gaussian periods of degree in , and how to calculate in a simple way, with the help of a computer, irreducible polynomials for elements of .

     

Computing the tame kernel of quadratic imaginary fields

J. Tate has determined the group (called the tame kernel) for six quadratic imaginary number fields where Modifying the method of Tate, H. Qin has done the same for and and M. Skaba for and

In the present paper we discuss the methods of Qin and Skaba, and we apply our results to the field

In the Appendix at the end of the paper K. Belabas and H. Gangl present the results of their computation of for some other values of The results agree with the conjectural structure of given in the paper by Browkin and Gangl.

     

Korovkin tests, approximation, and ergodic theory

We consider sequences of matrices with a block structure spectrally distributed as an -variate matrix-valued function , and, for any , we suppose that is a linear and positive operator. For every fixed we approximate the matrix in a suitable linear space of matrices by minimizing the Frobenius norm of when ranges over . The minimizer is denoted by . We show that only a simple Korovkin test over a finite number of polynomial test functions has to be performed in order to prove the following general facts:

1.

the sequence is distributed as ,

2.

the sequence is distributed as the constant function (i.e. is spectrally clustered at zero).

The first result is an ergodic one which can be used for solving numerical approximation theory problems. The second has a natural interpretation in the theory of the preconditioning associated to cg-like algorithms.

     

Higher-order Carmichael numbers

We define a Carmichael number of order to be a composite integer such that th-power raising defines an endomorphism of every -algebra that can be generated as a -module by elements. We give a simple criterion to determine whether a number is a Carmichael number of order , and we give a heuristic argument (based on an argument of Erdos for the usual Carmichael numbers) that indicates that for every there should be infinitely many Carmichael numbers of order . The argument suggests a method for finding examples of higher-order Carmichael numbers; we use the method to provide examples of Carmichael numbers of order .

     

On searching for solutions of the Diophantine equation

We propose an efficient search algorithm to solve the equation for a fixed value of 0$">. By parametrizing , this algorithm obtains and (if they exist) by solving a quadratic equation derived from divisors of . Thanks to the use of several efficient number-theoretic sieves, the new algorithm is much faster on average than previous straightforward algorithms. We performed a computer search for six values of below 1000 for which no solution had previously been found. We found three new integer solutions for and 931 in the range of .

     

Approximating the exponential from a Lie algebra to a Lie group

Consider a differential equation with and , where is a Lie algebra of the matricial Lie group . Every can be mapped to by the matrix exponential map with .

Most numerical methods for solving ordinary differential equations (ODEs) on Lie groups are based on the idea of representing the approximation of the exact solution , , by means of exact exponentials of suitable elements of the Lie algebra, applied to the initial value . This ensures that .

When the exponential is difficult to compute exactly, as is the case when the dimension is large, an approximation of plays an important role in the numerical solution of ODEs on Lie groups. In some cases rational or polynomial approximants are unsuitable and we consider alternative techniques, whereby is approximated by a product of simpler exponentials.

In this paper we present some ideas based on the use of the Strang splitting for the approximation of matrix exponentials. Several cases of and are considered, in tandem with general theory. Order conditions are discussed, and a number of numerical experiments conclude the paper.

     

Upper bounds for the prime divisors of Wendt's determinant

Let be an even integer, . The resultant of the polynomials and is known as Wendt's determinant of order . We prove that among the prime divisors of only those which divide or can be larger than , where and is the th Lucas number, except when and . Using this estimate we derive criteria for the nonsolvability of Fermat's congruence.

     

On the iteratively regularized Gauss-Newton method for solving nonlinear ill-posed problems

The iteratively regularized Gauss-Newton method is applied to compute the stable solutions to nonlinear ill-posed problems when the data is given approximately by with . In this method, the iterative sequence is defined successively by

where is an initial guess of the exact solution and is a given decreasing sequence of positive numbers admitting suitable properties. When is used to approximate , the stopping index should be designated properly. In this paper, an a posteriori stopping rule is suggested to choose the stopping index of iteration, and with the integer determined by this rule it is proved that

with a constant independent of , where denotes the iterative solution corresponding to the noise free case. As a consequence of this result, the convergence of is obtained, and moreover the rate of convergence is derived when satisfies a suitable ``source-wise representation". The results of this paper suggest that the iteratively regularized Gauss-Newton method, combined with our stopping rule, defines a regularization method of optimal order for each . Numerical examples for parameter estimation of a differential equation are given to test the theoretical results.

     

Rudin-Shapiro-like polynomials in

We examine sequences of polynomials with coefficients constructed using the iterations , where is the degree of and is the reciprocal polynomial of . If these generate the Rudin-Shapiro polynomials. We show that the norm of these polynomials is explicitly computable. We are particularly interested in the case where the iteration produces sequences with smallest possible asymptotic norm (or, equivalently, with largest possible asymptotic merit factor). The Rudin-Shapiro polynomials form one such sequence.

We determine all of degree less than 40 that generate sequences under the iteration with this property. These sequences have asymptotic merit factor 3. The first really distinct example has a of degree 19.

     

On the modular curves

Let denote an elliptic curve over and the modular curve classifying the elliptic curves over such that the representations of in the 7-torsion points of and of are symplectically isomorphic. In case is given by a Weierstraß equation such that the invariant is a square, we exhibit here nontrivial points of . From this we deduce an infinite family of curves for which has at least four nontrivial points.

     

Random Fibonacci sequences and the number

For the familiar Fibonacci sequence (defined by , and for ), increases exponentially with at a rate given by the golden ratio . But for a simple modification with both additions and subtractions - the random Fibonacci sequences defined by , and for , , where each sign is independent and either or - with probability - it is not even obvious if should increase with . Our main result is that

with probability . Finding the number involves the theory of random matrix products, Stern-Brocot division of the real line, a fractal measure, a computer calculation, and a rounding error analysis to validate the computer calculation.

     

On the convergence of certain Gauss-type quadrature formulas for unbounded intervals

We consider the convergence of Gauss-type quadrature formulas for the integral , where is a weight function on the half line . The -point Gauss-type quadrature formulas are constructed such that they are exact in the set of Laurent polynomials }, where is a sequence of integers satisfying and . It is proved that under certain Carleman-type conditions for the weight and when or goes to , then convergence holds for all functions for which is integrable on . Some numerical experiments compare the convergence of these quadrature formulas with the convergence of the classical Gauss quadrature formulas for the half line.

     

Extrapolation methods and derivatives of limits of sequences

Let be an infinite sequence whose limit or antilimit can be approximated very efficiently by applying a suitable extrapolation method E to . Assume that the and hence also are differentiable functions of some parameter , being the limit or antilimit of , and that we need to approximate . A direct way of achieving this would be by applying again a suitable extrapolation method E to the sequence , and this approach has often been used efficiently in various problems of practical importance. Unfortunately, as has been observed at least in some important cases, when and have essentially different asymptotic behaviors as , the approximations to produced by this approach, despite the fact that they are good, do not converge as quickly as those obtained for , and this is puzzling. In this paper we first give a rigorous mathematical explanation of this phenomenon for the cases in which E is the Richardson extrapolation process and E is a generalization of it, thus showing that the phenomenon has very little to do with numerics. Following that, we propose a procedure that amounts to first applying the extrapolation method E to and then differentiating the resulting approximations to , and we provide a thorough convergence and stability analysis in conjunction with the Richardson extrapolation process. It follows from this analysis that the new procedure for has practically the same convergence properties as E for . We show that a very efficient way of implementing the new procedure is by actually differentiating the recursion relations satisfied by the extrapolation method used, and we derive the necessary algorithm for the Richardson extrapolation process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the new approach with numerical examples that also support the theory. We discuss the application of this approach to numerical integration in the presence of endpoint singularities. We also discuss briefly its application in conjunction with other extrapolation methods.

     

Isomorphisms between Artin-Schreier towers

We give a method for efficiently computing isomorphisms between towers of Artin-Schreier extensions over a finite field. We find that isomorphisms between towers of degree over a fixed field can be computed, composed, and inverted in time essentially linear in . The method relies on an approximation process.

     

The Postage Stamp Problem: An algorithm to determine the

Given an integral ``stamp" basis with and a positive integer , we define the -range as

. For given and , the extremal basis has the largest possible extremal -range

We give an algorithm to determine the -range. We prove some properties of the -range formula, and we conjecture its form for the extremal -range. We consider parameter bases , where the basis elements are given functions of . For we conjecture the extremal parameter bases for .

     

Computational scales of Sobolev norms with application to preconditioning

This paper provides a framework for developing computationally efficient multilevel preconditioners and representations for Sobolev norms. Specifically, given a Hilbert space and a nested sequence of subspaces , we construct operators which are spectrally equivalent to those of the form . Here , , are positive numbers and is the orthogonal projector onto with . We first present abstract results which show when is spectrally equivalent to a similarly constructed operator defined in terms of an approximation of , for . We show that these results lead to efficient preconditioners for discretizations of differential and pseudo-differential operators of positive and negative order. These results extend to sums of operators. For example, singularly perturbed problems such as can be preconditioned uniformly independently of the parameter . We also show how to precondition an operator which results from Tikhonov regularization of a problem with noisy data. Finally, we describe how the technique provides computationally efficient bounded discrete extensions which have applications to domain decomposition.

     

Improving the parallelized Pollard lambda search on anomalous binary curves

The best algorithm known for finding logarithms on an elliptic curve is the (parallelized) Pollard lambda collision search. We show how to apply a Pollard lambda search on a set of equivalence classes derived from , which requires fewer iterations than the standard approach. In the case of anomalous binary curves over , the new approach speeds up the standard algorithm by a factor of .

     

Computer verification of the Ankeny-Artin-Chowla Conjecture for all primes less than

Let be a prime congruent to 1 modulo 4, and let be rational integers such that is the fundamental unit of the real quadratic field . The Ankeny-Artin-Chowla conjecture (AAC conjecture) asserts that will not divide . This is equivalent to the assertion that will not divide , where denotes the th Bernoulli number. Although first published in 1952, this conjecture still remains unproved today. Indeed, it appears to be most difficult to prove. Even testing the conjecture can be quite challenging because of the size of the numbers ; for example, when , then both and exceed . In 1988 the AAC conjecture was verified by computer for all . In this paper we describe a new technique for testing the AAC conjecture and we provide some results of a computer run of the method for all primes up to .

     

Tables of curves with many points

These tables record results on curves with many points over finite fields. For relatively small genus () and a small power of or we give in two tables the best presently known bounds for , the maximum number of rational points on a smooth absolutely irreducible projective curve of genus over a field of cardinality . In additional tables we list for a given pair the type of construction of the best curve so far, and we give a reference to the literature where such a curve can be found.