On a conjecture of Whittaker concerning uniformization of hyperelliptic curves

This article concerns an old conjecture due to E. T. Whittaker, aiming to describe the group uniformizing an arbitrary hyperelliptic Riemann surface as an index two subgroup of the monodromy group of an explicit second order linear differential equation with singularities at the values .

Whittaker and collaborators in the thirties, and R. Rankin some twenty years later, were able to prove the conjecture for several families of hyperelliptic surfaces, characterized by the fact that they admit a large group of symmetries. However, general results of the analytic theory of moduli of Riemann surfaces, developed later, imply that Whittaker's conjecture cannot be true in its full generality.

Recently, numerical computations have shown that Whittaker's prediction is incorrect for random surfaces, and in fact it has been conjectured that it only holds for the known cases of surfaces with a large group of automorphisms.

The main goal of this paper is to prove that having many automorphisms is not a necessary condition for a surface to satisfy Whittaker's conjecture.

     

On prime galois coverings of the Riemann sphere

Research supported by a grant of the CICYT, M.E.C., Spain.     

On Beauville structures on the groups S n and A n

It is known that the symmetric group S _n , for n ≥ 5, and the alternating group A _n , for large n, admit a Beauville structure. In this paper we prove that A _n admits a Beauville (resp. strongly real Beauville) structure if and only if n ≥ 6 (resp n ≥ 7). We also show that S _n admits a strongly real Beauville structure for n ≥ 5.     

Genus two extremal surfaces: Extremal discs, isometries and Weierstrass points

It is known that the largest disc that a compact hyperbolic surface of genusg may contain has radiusR=cosh⁻¹(1/2sin(π/(12g−6))). It is also known that the number of such (extremal) surfaces, although finite, grows exponentially withg. Elsewhere the authors have shown that for genusg>3 extremal surfaces contain only one extremal disc. Here we describe in full detail the situation in genus 2. Following results that go back to Fricke and Klein we first show that there are exactly nine different extremal surfaces. Then we proceed to locate the various extremal discs that each of these surfaces possesses as well as their set of Weierstrass points and group of isometries. Both authors partially supported by Grant BFM2000-0031 of the SGPI.MCYT.     

On unramified normal coverings of hyperelliptic curves

It is well known that the number of unramified normal coverings of an irreducible complex algebraic curve C with a group of covering transformations isomorphic to Z₂⊕Z₂ is (2^4g−3⋅2^2g+2)/6. Assume that C is hyperelliptic, say . Horiouchi has given the explicit algebraic equations of the subset of those covers which turn out to be hyperelliptic themselves. There are of this particular type. In this article, we provide algebraic equations for the remaining ones.     

Fields of moduli and definition of hyperelliptic covers

In this paper, for all genera g>1, g ≡ 1 mod 4, we construct an explicit hyperelliptic curve whose field of moduli is and such that the minimum subfield of over which it can be hyperelliptically defined is a degree three extension of . These examples are related to previous work by Earle, Shimura, and Mestre and to a recent conjecture by Shaska. Received: 19 January 2005     

Right triangles with algebraic sides and elliptic curves over number fields

Given any positive integer n, we prove the existence of infinitely many right triangles with area n and side lengths in certain number fields. This generalizes the famous congruent number problem. The proof allows the explicit construction of these triangles; for this purpose we find for any positive integer n an explicit cubic number field ℚ(λ) (depending on n) and an explicit point P _λ of infinite order in the Mordell-Weil group of the elliptic curve Y ² = X ³ − n ² X over ℚ(λ). Research of the rest of authors was supported in part by grant MTM 2006-01859 (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, Spain).