Project description
Computational Number Theory is a fairly recent part of pure mathematics even if computations in number theory are a very old subject. But over the last few decades this has changed dramatically with the modern, powerful and cheap computers. In the area of explicit computations on elliptic curves, there are two subjects that underwent a great development recently: elliptic curves over finite fields (which are used for cryptography) and 'descent' methods on elliptic curves over global fields, such as the field of rational numbers.
It is a difficult question for a given elliptic curve over a number field to decide if there are infinitely many solutions over this field, and if so, to determine the rank of the Mordell-Weil group. Currently, there are only two algorithms implemented for finding this rank, one is the descent method that goes back to Mordell, Selmer, Cassels,... and the other is based on the work of Gross, Zagier, Kolyvagin... using the link of elliptic curves to modular forms. While the first approach works very well over number fields of small degree, it becomes almost impossible to determine the rank of elliptic curves over number fields of larger degree. The second method unfortunately is not always applicable, especially the field must be either the field of rational numbers or a quadratic extension thereof.
There is another way of exploiting the relation between elliptic curves and modular forms by using the p-adic theory of modular forms and the so-called Iwasawa theory for elliptic curves. Results by Kato, Urban, Skinner give us a completely new algorithm for computing the rank and other invariants of the elliptic curve, but not much of this has actually been implemented. Possible PhD projects could concern the further development of these new methods and their implementation.