254A, Notes 3: Local well-posedness for the Euler equations

We now turn to the local existence theory for the initial value problem for the incompressible Euler equations

 

For sake of discussion we will just work in the non-periodic domain , , although the arguments here can be adapted without much difficulty to the periodic setting. We will only work with solutions in which the pressure is normalised in the usual fashion:

 

Formally, the Euler equations (with normalised pressure) arise as the vanishing viscosity limit of the Navier-Stokes equations

 

that was studied in previous notes. However, because most of the bounds established in previous notes, either on the lifespan of the solution or on the size of the solution itself, depended on , it is not immediate how to justify passing to the limit and obtain either a strong well-posedness theory or a weak solution theory for the limiting equation (1). (For instance, weak solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations (or the approximate solutions used to create such weak solutions) have lying in for , but the bound on the norm is and so one could lose this regularity in the limit , at which point it is not clear how to ensure that the nonlinear term still converges in the sense of distributions to what one expects.)

Nevertheless, by carefully using the energy method (which we will do loosely following an approach of Bertozzi and Majda), it is still possible to obtain local-in-time estimates on (high-regularity) solutions to (3) that are uniform in the limit . Such a priori estimates can then be combined with a number of variants of these estimates obtain a satisfactory local well-posedness theory for the Euler equations. Among other things, we will be able to establish the Beale-Kato-Majda criterion – smooth solutions to the Euler (or Navier-Stokes) equations can be continued indefinitely unless the integral

becomes infinite at the final time , where is the vorticity field. The vorticity has the important property that it is transported by the Euler flow, and in two spatial dimensions it can be used to establish global regularity for both the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations in these settings. (Unfortunately, in three and higher dimensions the phenomenon of vortex stretching has frustrated all attempts to date to use the vorticity transport property to establish global regularity of either equation in this setting.)

There is a rather different approach to establishing local well-posedness for the Euler equations, which relies on the vorticity-stream formulation of these equations. This will be discused in a later set of notes.

254A, Notes 2: Weak solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations

In the previous set of notes we developed a theory of “strong” solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations. This theory, based around viewing the Navier-Stokes equations as a perturbation of the linear heat equation, has many attractive features: solutions exist locally, are unique, depend continuously on the initial data, have a high degree of regularity, can be continued in time as long as a sufficiently high regularity norm is under control, and tend to enjoy the same sort of conservation laws that classical solutions do. However, it is a major open problem as to whether these solutions can be extended to be (forward) global in time, because the norms that we know how to control globally in time do not have high enough regularity to be useful for continuing the solution. Also, the theory becomes degenerate in the inviscid limit .

However, it is possible to construct “weak” solutions which lack many of the desirable features of strong solutions (notably, uniqueness, propagation of regularity, and conservation laws) but can often be constructed globally in time even when one us unable to do so for strong solutions. Broadly speaking, one usually constructs weak solutions by some sort of “compactness method”, which can generally be described as follows.

1. Construct a sequence of “approximate solutions” to the desired equation, for instance by developing a well-posedness theory for some “regularised” approximation to the original equation. (This theory often follows similar lines to those in the previous set of notes, for instance using such tools as the contraction mapping theorem to construct the approximate solutions.)
2. Establish some uniform bounds (over appropriate time intervals) on these approximate solutions, even in the limit as an approximation parameter is sent to zero. (Uniformity is key; non-uniform bounds are often easy to obtain if one puts enough “mollification”, “hyper-dissipation”, or “discretisation” in the approximating equation.)
3. Use some sort of “weak compactness” (e.g., the Banach-Alaoglu theorem, the Arzela-Ascoli theorem, or the Rellich compactness theorem) to extract a subsequence of approximate solutions that converge (in a topology weaker than that associated to the available uniform bounds) to a limit. (Note that there is no reason a priori to expect such limit points to be unique, or to have any regularity properties beyond that implied by the available uniform bounds..)
4. Show that this limit solves the original equation in a suitable weak sense.

The quality of these weak solutions is very much determined by the type of uniform bounds one can obtain on the approximate solution; the stronger these bounds are, the more properties one can obtain on these weak solutions. For instance, if the approximate solutions enjoy an energy identity leading to uniform energy bounds, then (by using tools such as Fatou’s lemma) one tends to obtain energy inequalities for the resulting weak solution; but if one somehow is able to obtain uniform bounds in a higher regularity norm than the energy then one can often recover the full energy identity. If the uniform bounds are at the regularity level needed to obtain well-posedness, then one generally expects to upgrade the weak solution to a strong solution. (This phenomenon is often formalised through weak-strong uniqueness theorems, which we will discuss later in these notes.) Thus we see that as far as attacking global regularity is concerned, both the theory of strong solutions and the theory of weak solutions encounter essentially the same obstacle, namely the inability to obtain uniform bounds on (exact or approximate) solutions at high regularities (and at arbitrary times).

For simplicity, we will focus our discussion in this notes on finite energy weak solutions on . There is a completely analogous theory for periodic weak solutions on (or equivalently, weak solutions on the torus which we will leave to the interested reader.

In recent years, a completely different way to construct weak solutions to the Navier-Stokes or Euler equations has been developed that are not based on the above compactness methods, but instead based on techniques of convex integration. These will be discussed in a later set of notes.

254A, Notes 1: Local well-posedness of the Navier-Stokes equations

We now begin the rigorous theory of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations

where is a given constant (the kinematic viscosity, or viscosity for short), is an unknown vector field (the velocity field), and is an unknown scalar field (the pressure field). Here is a time interval, usually of the form or . We will either be interested in spatially decaying situations, in which decays to zero as , or -periodic (or periodic for short) settings, in which one has for all . (One can also require the pressure to be periodic as well; this brings up a small subtlety in the uniqueness theory for these equations, which we will address later in this set of notes.) As is usual, we abuse notation by identifying a -periodic function on with a function on the torus .

In order for the system (1) to even make sense, one requires some level of regularity on the unknown fields ; this turns out to be a relatively important technical issue that will require some attention later in this set of notes, and we will end up transforming (1) into other forms that are more suitable for lower regularity candidate solution. Our focus here will be on local existence of these solutions in a short time interval or , for some . (One could in principle also consider solutions that extend to negative times, but it turns out that the equations are not time-reversible, and the forward evolution is significantly more natural to study than the backwards one.) The study of Euler equations, in which , will be deferred to subsequent lecture notes.

As the unknown fields involve a time parameter , and the first equation of (1) involves time derivatives of , the system (1) should be viewed as describing an evolution for the velocity field . (As we shall see later, the pressure is not really an independent dynamical field, as it can essentially be expressed in terms of the velocity field without requiring any differentiation or integration in time.) As such, the natural question to study for this system is the initial value problem, in which an initial velocity field is specified, and one wishes to locate a solution to the system (1) with initial condition

for . Of course, in order for this initial condition to be compatible with the second equation in (1), we need the compatibility condition

and one should also impose some regularity, decay, and/or periodicity hypotheses on in order to be compatible with corresponding level of regularity etc. on the solution .

The fundamental questions in the local theory of an evolution equation are that of existence, uniqueness, and continuous dependence. In the context of the Navier-Stokes equations, these questions can be phrased (somewhat broadly) as follows:

• (a) (Local existence) Given suitable initial data , does there exist a solution to the above initial value problem that exists for some time ? What can one say about the time of existence? How regular is the solution?
• (b) (Uniqueness) Is it possible to have two solutions of a certain regularity class to the same initial value problem on a common time interval ? To what extent does the answer to this question depend on the regularity assumed on one or both of the solutions? Does one need to normalise the solutions beforehand in order to obtain uniqueness?
• (c) (Continuous dependence on data) If one perturbs the initial conditions by a small amount, what happens to the solution and on the time of existence ? (This question tends to only be sensible once one has a reasonable uniqueness theory.)

The answers to these questions tend to be more complicated than a simple “Yes” or “No”, for instance they can depend on the precise regularity hypotheses one wishes to impose on the data and on the solution, and even on exactly how one interprets the concept of a “solution”. However, once one settles on such a set of hypotheses, it generally happens that one either gets a “strong” theory (in which one has existence, uniqueness, and continuous dependence on the data), a “weak” theory (in which one has existence of somewhat low-quality solutions, but with only limited uniqueness results (or even some spectacular failures of uniqueness) and almost no continuous dependence on data), or no satsfactory theory whatsoever. In the former case, we say (roughly speaking) that the initial value problem is locally well-posed, and one can then try to build upon the theory to explore more interesting topics such as global existence and asymptotics, classifying potential blowup, rigorous justification of conservation laws, and so forth. With a weak local theory, it becomes much more difficult to address these latter sorts of questions, and there are serious analytic pitfalls that one could fall into if one tries too strenuously to treat weak solutions as if they were strong. (For instance, conservation laws that are rigorously justified for strong, high-regularity solutions may well fail for weak, low-regularity ones.) Also, even if one is primarily interested in solutions at one level of regularity, the well-posedness theory at another level of regularity can be very helpful; for instance, if one is interested in smooth solutions in , it turns out that the well-posedness theory at the critical regularity of can be used to establish globally smooth solutions from small initial data. As such, it can become quite important to know what kind of local theory one can obtain for a given equation.

This set of notes will focus on the “strong” theory, in which a substantial amount of regularity is assumed in the initial data and solution, giving a satisfactory (albeit largely local-in-time) well-posedness theory. “Weak” solutions will be considered in later notes.

The Navier-Stokes equations are not the simplest of partial differential equations to study, in part because they are an amalgam of three more basic equations, which behave rather differently from each other (for instance the first equation is nonlinear, while the latter two are linear):

• (a) Transport equations such as .
• (b) Diffusion equations (or heat equations) such as .
• (c) Systems such as , , which (for want of a better name) we will call Leray systems.

Accordingly, we will devote some time to getting some preliminary understanding of the linear diffusion and Leray systems before returning to the theory for the Navier-Stokes equation. Transport systems will be discussed further in subsequent notes; in this set of notes, we will instead focus on a more basic example of nonlinear equations, namely the first-order ordinary differential equation

where takes values in some finite-dimensional (real or complex) vector space on some time interval , and is a given linear or nonlinear function. (Here, we use “interval” to denote a connected non-empty subset of ; in particular, we allow intervals to be half-infinite or infinite, or to be open, closed, or half-open.) Fundamental results in this area include the Picard existence and uniqueness theorem, the Duhamel formula, and Grönwall’s inequality; they will serve as motivation for the approach to local well-posedness that we will adopt in this set of notes. (There are other ways to construct strong or weak solutions for Navier-Stokes and Euler equations, which we will discuss in later notes.)

A key role in our treatment here will be played by the fundamental theorem of calculus (in various forms and variations). Roughly speaking, this theorem, and its variants, allow us to recast differential equations (such as (1) or (4)) as integral equations. Such integral equations are less tractable algebraically than their differential counterparts (for instance, they are not ideal for verifying conservation laws), but are significantly more convenient for well-posedness theory, basically because integration tends to increase the regularity of a function, while differentiation reduces it. (Indeed, the problem of “losing derivatives”, or more precisely “losing regularity”, is a key obstacle that one often has to address when trying to establish well-posedness for PDE, particularly those that are quite nonlinear and with rough initial data, though for nonlinear parabolic equations such as Navier-Stokes the obstacle is not as serious as it is for some other PDE, due to the smoothing effects of the heat equation.)

One weakness of the methods deployed here are that the quantitative bounds produced deteriorate to the point of uselessness in the inviscid limit , rendering these techniques unsuitable for analysing the Euler equations in which . However, some of the methods developed in later notes have bounds that remain uniform in the limit, allowing one to also treat the Euler equations.

In this and subsequent set of notes, we use the following asymptotic notation (a variant of Vinogradov notation that is commonly used in PDE and harmonic analysis). The statement , , or will be used to denote an estimate of the form (or equivalently ) for some constant , and will be used to denote the estimates . If the constant depends on other parameters (such as the dimension ), this will be indicated by subscripts, thus for instance denotes the estimate for some depending on .

On the recently removed paper from the New York Journal of Mathematics

In the last week or so there has been some discussion on the internet about a paper (initially authored by Hill and Tabachnikov) that was initially accepted for publication in the Mathematical Intelligencer, but with the editor-in-chief of that journal later deciding against publication; the paper, in significantly revised form (and now authored solely by Hill), was then quickly accepted by one of the editors in the New York Journal of Mathematics, but then was removed from publication after objections from several members on the editorial board of NYJM that the paper had not been properly refereed or was within the scope of the journal; see this statement by Benson Farb, who at the time was on that board, for more details.  Some further discussion of this incident may be found on Tim Gowers’ blog; the most recent version of the paper, as well as a number of prior revisions, are still available on the arXiv here.

For whatever reason, some of the discussion online has focused on the role of Amie Wilkinson, a mathematician from the University of Chicago (and who, incidentally, was a recent speaker here at UCLA in our Distinguished Lecture Series), who wrote an email to the editor-in-chief of the Intelligencer raising some concerns about the content of the paper and suggesting that it be published alongside commentary from other experts in the field.  (This, by the way, is not uncommon practice when dealing with a potentially provocative publication in one field by authors coming from a different field; for instance, when Emmanuel Candès and I published a paper in the Annals of Statistics introducing what we called the “Dantzig selector”, the Annals solicited a number of articles discussing the selector from prominent statisticians, and then invited us to submit a rejoinder.)    It seems that the editors of the Intelligencer decided instead to reject the paper.  The paper then had a complicated interaction with NYJM, but, as stated by Wilkinson in her recent statement on this matter as well as by Farb, this was done without any involvement from Wilkinson.  (It is true that Farb happens to also be Wilkinson’s husband, but I see no reason to doubt their statements on this matter.)

I have not interacted much with the Intelligencer, but I have published a few papers with NYJM over the years; it is an early example of a quality “diamond open access” mathematics journal.  It seems that this incident may have uncovered some issues with their editorial procedure for reviewing and accepting papers, but I am hopeful that they can be addressed to avoid this sort of event occurring again.

 

 

The structure of correlations of multiplicative functions at almost all scales, with applications to the Chowla and Elliott conjectures

Joni Teräväinen and I have just uploaded to the arXiv our paper “The structure of correlations of multiplicative functions at almost all scales, with applications to the Chowla and Elliott conjectures“. This is a sequel to our previous paper that studied logarithmic correlations of the form

where were bounded multiplicative functions, were fixed shifts, was a quantity going off to infinity, and was a generalised limit functional. Our main technical result asserted that these correlations were necessarily the uniform limit of periodic functions . Furthermore, if (weakly) pretended to be a Dirichlet character , then the could be chosen to be –isotypic in the sense that whenever are integers with coprime to the periods of and ; otherwise, if did not weakly pretend to be any Dirichlet character , then vanished completely. This was then used to verify several cases of the logarithmically averaged Elliott and Chowla conjectures.

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the extent to which the methods could be extended to non-logarithmically averaged settings. For our main technical result, we now considered the unweighted averages

where is an additional parameter. Our main result was now as follows. If did not weakly pretend to be a twisted Dirichlet character , then converged to zero on (doubly logarithmic) average as . If instead did pretend to be such a twisted Dirichlet character, then converged on (doubly logarithmic) average to a limit of -isotypic functions . Thus, roughly speaking, one has the approximation

for most .

Informally, this says that at almost all scales (where “almost all” means “outside of a set of logarithmic density zero”), the non-logarithmic averages behave much like their logarithmic counterparts except for a possible additional twisting by an Archimedean character (which interacts with the Archimedean parameter in much the same way that the Dirichlet character interacts with the non-Archimedean parameter ). One consequence of this is that most of the recent results on the logarithmically averaged Chowla and Elliott conjectures can now be extended to their non-logarithmically averaged counterparts, so long as one excludes a set of exceptional scales of logarithmic density zero. For instance, the Chowla conjecture

is now established for either odd or equal to , so long as one excludes an exceptional set of scales.

In the logarithmically averaged setup, the main idea was to combine two very different pieces of information on . The first, coming from recent results in ergodic theory, was to show that was well approximated in some sense by a nilsequence. The second was to use the “entropy decrement argument” to obtain an approximate isotopy property of the form

for “most” primes and integers . Combining the two facts, one eventually finds that only the almost periodic components of the nilsequence are relevant.

In the current situation, each is approximated by a nilsequence, but the nilsequence can vary with (although there is some useful “Lipschitz continuity” of this nilsequence with respect to the parameter). Meanwhile, the entropy decrement argument gives an approximation basically of the form

for “most” . The arguments then proceed largely as in the logarithmically averaged case. A key lemma to handle the dependence on the new parameter is the following cohomological statement: if one has a map that was a quasimorphism in the sense that for all and some small , then there exists a real number such that for all small . This is achieved by applying a standard “cocycle averaging argument” to the cocycle .

It would of course be desirable to not have the set of exceptional scales. We only know of one (implausible) scenario in which we can do this, namely when one has far fewer (in particular, subexponentially many) sign patterns for (say) the Liouville function than predicted by the Chowla conjecture. In this scenario (roughly analogous to the “Siegel zero” scenario in multiplicative number theory), the entropy of the Liouville sign patterns is so small that the entropy decrement argument becomes powerful enough to control all scales rather than almost all scales. On the other hand, this scenario seems to be self-defeating, in that it allows one to establish a large number of cases of the Chowla conjecture, and the full Chowla conjecture is inconsistent with having unusually few sign patterns. Still it hints that future work in this direction may need to split into “low entropy” and “high entropy” cases, in analogy to how many arguments in multiplicative number theory have to split into the “Siegel zero” and “no Siegel zero” cases.

Polymath15, tenth thread: numerics update

This is the tenth “research” thread of the Polymath15 project to upper bound the de Bruijn-Newman constant , continuing this post. Discussion of the project of a non-research nature can continue for now in the existing proposal thread. Progress will be summarised at this Polymath wiki page.

Most of the progress since the last thread has been on the numerical side, in which the various techniques to numerically establish zero-free regions to the equation have been streamlined, made faster, and extended to larger heights than were previously possible.  The best bound for now depends on the height to which one is willing to assume the Riemann hypothesis.  Using the conservative verification up to height (slightly larger than) , which has been confirmed by independent work of Platt et al. and Gourdon-Demichel, the best bound remains at .  Using the verification up to height claimed by Gourdon-Demichel, this improves slightly to , and if one assumes the Riemann hypothesis up to height the bound improves to , contingent on a numerical computation that is still underway.   (See the table below the fold for more data of this form.)  This is broadly consistent with the expectation that the bound on should be inversely proportional to the logarithm of the height at which the Riemann hypothesis is verified.

As progress seems to have stabilised, it may be time to transition to the writing phase of the Polymath15 project.  (There are still some interesting research questions to pursue, such as numerically investigating the zeroes of for negative values of , but the writeup does not necessarily have to contain every single direction pursued in the project. If enough additional interesting findings are unearthed then one could always consider writing a second paper, for instance.

Below the fold is the detailed progress report on the numerics by Rudolph Dwars and Kalpesh Muchhal.

254A, Notes 0: Physical derivation of the incompressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations

This coming fall quarter, I am teaching a class on topics in the mathematical theory of incompressible fluid equations, focusing particularly on the incompressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations. These two equations are by no means the only equations used to model fluids, but I will focus on these two equations in this course to narrow the focus down to something manageable. I have not fully decided on the choice of topics to cover in this course, but I would probably begin with some core topics such as local well-posedness theory and blowup criteria, conservation laws, and construction of weak solutions, then move on to some topics such as boundary layers and the Prandtl equations, the Euler-Poincare-Arnold interpretation of the Euler equations as an infinite dimensional geodesic flow, and some discussion of the Onsager conjecture. I will probably also continue to more advanced and recent topics in the winter quarter.

In this initial set of notes, we begin by reviewing the physical derivation of the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations from the first principles of Newtonian mechanics, and specifically from Newton’s famous three laws of motion. Strictly speaking, this derivation is not needed for the mathematical analysis of these equations, which can be viewed if one wishes as an arbitrarily chosen system of partial differential equations without any physical motivation; however, I feel that the derivation sheds some insight and intuition on these equations, and is also worth knowing on purely intellectual grounds regardless of its mathematical consequences. I also find it instructive to actually see the journey from Newton’s law

to the seemingly rather different-looking law

for incompressible Navier-Stokes (or, if one drops the viscosity term , the Euler equations).

Our discussion in this set of notes is physical rather than mathematical, and so we will not be working at mathematical levels of rigour and precision. In particular we will be fairly casual about interchanging summations, limits, and integrals, we will manipulate approximate identities as if they were exact identities (e.g., by differentiating both sides of the approximate identity), and we will not attempt to verify any regularity or convergence hypotheses in the expressions being manipulated. (The same holds for the exercises in this text, which also do not need to be justified at mathematical levels of rigour.) Of course, once we resume the mathematical portion of this course in subsequent notes, such issues will be an important focus of careful attention. This is a basic division of labour in mathematical modeling: non-rigorous heuristic reasoning is used to derive a mathematical model from physical (or other “real-life”) principles, but once a precise model is obtained, the analysis of that model should be completely rigorous if at all possible (even if this requires applying the model to regimes which do not correspond to the original physical motivation of that model). See the discussion by John Ball quoted at the end of these slides of Gero Friesecke for an expansion of these points.

Note: our treatment here will differ slightly from that presented in many fluid mechanics texts, in that it will emphasise first-principles derivations from many-particle systems, rather than relying on bulk laws of physics, such as the laws of thermodynamics, which we will not cover here. (However, the derivations from bulk laws tend to be more robust, in that they are not as reliant on assumptions about the particular interactions between particles. In particular, the physical hypotheses we assume in this post are probably quite a bit stronger than the minimal assumptions needed to justify the Euler or Navier-Stokes equations, which can hold even in situations in which one or more of the hypotheses assumed here break down.)

Trying to understand the Galois correspondence

Let be a field, and let be a finite extension of that field; in this post we will denote such a relationship by . We say that is a Galois extension of if the cardinality of the automorphism group of fixing is as large as it can be, namely the degree of the extension. In that case, we call the Galois group of over and denote it also by . The fundamental theorem of Galois theory then gives a one-to-one correspondence (also known as the Galois correspondence) between the intermediate extensions between and and the subgroups of :

Theorem 1 (Fundamental theorem of Galois theory) Let be a Galois extension of .

• (i) If is an intermediate field betwen and , then is a Galois extension of , and is a subgroup of .
• (ii) Conversely, if is a subgroup of , then there is a unique intermediate field such that ; namely is the set of elements of that are fixed by .
• (iii) If and , then if and only if is a subgroup of .
• (iv) If is an intermediate field between and , then is a Galois extension of if and only if is a normal subgroup of . In that case, is isomorphic to the quotient group .

Example 2 Let , and let be the degree Galois extension formed by adjoining a primitive root of unity (that is to say, is the cyclotomic field of order ). Then is isomorphic to the multiplicative cyclic group (the invertible elements of the ring ). Amongst the intermediate fields, one has the cyclotomic fields of the form where divides ; they are also Galois extensions, with isomorphic to and isomorphic to the elements of such that modulo . (There can also be other intermediate fields, corresponding to other subgroups of .)

Example 3 Let be the field of rational functions of one indeterminate with complex coefficients, and let be the field formed by adjoining an root to , thus . Then is a degree Galois extension of with Galois group isomorphic to (with an element corresponding to the field automorphism of that sends to ). The intermediate fields are of the form where divides ; they are also Galois extensions, with isomorphic to and isomorphic to the multiples of in .

There is an analogous Galois correspondence in the covering theory of manifolds. For simplicity we restrict attention to finite covers. If is a connected manifold and is a finite covering map of by another connected manifold , we denote this relationship by . (Later on we will change our function notations slightly and write in place of the more traditional , and similarly for the deck transformations below; more on this below the fold.) If , we can define to be the group of deck transformations: continuous maps which preserve the fibres of . We say that this covering map is a Galois cover if the cardinality of the group is as large as it can be. In that case we call the Galois group of over and denote it by .

Suppose is a finite cover of . An intermediate cover between and is a cover of by , such that , in such a way that the covering maps are compatible, in the sense that is the composition of and . This sort of compatibilty condition will be implicitly assumed whenever we chain together multiple instances of the notation. Two intermediate covers are equivalent if they cover each other, in a fashion compatible with all the other covering maps, thus and . We then have the analogous Galois correspondence:

Theorem 4 (Fundamental theorem of covering spaces) Let be a Galois covering.

• (i) If is an intermediate cover betwen and , then is a Galois extension of , and is a subgroup of .
• (ii) Conversely, if is a subgroup of , then there is a intermediate cover , unique up to equivalence, such that .
• (iii) If and , then if and only if is a subgroup of .
• (iv) If , then is a Galois cover of if and only if is a normal subgroup of . In that case, is isomorphic to the quotient group .

Example 5 Let , and let be the -fold cover of with covering map . Then is a Galois cover of , and is isomorphic to the cyclic group . The intermediate covers are (up to equivalence) of the form with covering map where divides ; they are also Galois covers, with isomorphic to and isomorphic to the multiples of in .

Given the strong similarity between the two theorems, it is natural to ask if there is some more concrete connection between Galois theory and the theory of finite covers.

In one direction, if the manifolds have an algebraic structure (or a complex structure), then one can relate covering spaces to field extensions by considering the field of rational functions (or meromorphic functions) on the space. For instance, if and is the coordinate on , one can consider the field of rational functions on ; the -fold cover with coordinate from Example 5 similarly has a field of rational functions. The covering relates the two coordinates by the relation , at which point one sees that the rational functions on are a degree extension of that of (formed by adjoining the root of unity to ). In this way we see that Example 5 is in fact closely related to Example 3.

Exercise 6 What happens if one uses meromorphic functions in place of rational functions in the above example? (To answer this question, I found it convenient to use a discrete Fourier transform associated to the multiplicative action of the roots of unity on to decompose the meromorphic functions on as a linear combination of functions invariant under this action, times a power of the coordinate for .)

I was curious however about the reverse direction. Starting with some field extensions , is it is possible to create manifold like spaces associated to these fields in such a fashion that (say) behaves like a “covering space” to with a group of deck transformations isomorphic to , so that the Galois correspondences agree? Also, given how the notion of a path (and associated concepts such as loops, monodromy and the fundamental group) play a prominent role in the theory of covering spaces, can spaces such as or also come with a notion of a path that is somehow compatible with the Galois correspondence?

The standard answer from modern algebraic geometry (as articulated for instance in this nice MathOverflow answer by Minhyong Kim) is to set equal to the spectrum of the field . As a set, the spectrum of a commutative ring is defined as the set of prime ideals of . Generally speaking, the map that maps a commutative ring to its spectrum tends to act like an inverse of the operation that maps a space to a ring of functions on that space. For instance, if one considers the commutative ring of regular functions on , then each point in gives rise to the prime ideal , and one can check that these are the only such prime ideals (other than the zero ideal ), giving an almost one-to-one correspondence between and . (The zero ideal corresponds instead to the generic point of .)

Of course, the spectrum of a field such as is just a point, as the zero ideal is the only prime ideal. Naively, it would then seem that there is not enough space inside such a point to support a rich enough structure of paths to recover the Galois theory of this field. In modern algebraic geometry, one addresses this issue by considering not just the set-theoretic elements of , but more general “base points” that map from some other (affine) scheme to (one could also consider non-affine base points of course). One has to rework many of the fundamentals of the subject to accommodate this “relative point of view“, for instance replacing the usual notion of topology with an étale topology, but once one does so one obtains a very satisfactory theory.

As an exercise, I set myself the task of trying to interpret Galois theory as an analogue of covering space theory in a more classical fashion, without explicit reference to more modern concepts such as schemes, spectra, or étale topology. After some experimentation, I found a reasonably satisfactory way to do so as follows. The space that one associates with in this classical perspective is not the single point , but instead the much larger space consisting of ring homomorphisms from to arbitrary integral domains ; informally, consists of all the “models” or “representations” of (in the spirit of this previous blog post). (There is a technical set-theoretic issue here because the class of integral domains is a proper class, so that will also be a proper class; I will completely ignore such technicalities in this post.) We view each such homomorphism as a single point in . The analogous notion of a path from one point to another is then a homomorphism of integral domains, such that is the composition of with . Note that every prime ideal in the spectrum of a commutative ring gives rise to a point in the space defined here, namely the quotient map to the ring , which is an integral domain because is prime. So one can think of as being a distinguished subset of ; alternatively, one can think of as a sort of “penumbra” surrounding . In particular, when is a field, defines a special point in , namely the identity homomorphism .

Below the fold I would like to record this interpretation of Galois theory, by first revisiting the theory of covering spaces using paths as the basic building block, and then adapting that theory to the theory of field extensions using the spaces indicated above. This is not too far from the usual scheme-theoretic way of phrasing the connection between the two topics (basically I have replaced étale-type points with more classical points ), but I had not seen it explicitly articulated before, so I am recording it here for my own benefit and for any other readers who may be interested.

QED version 2.0: an interactive text in first-order logic

As readers who have followed my previous post will know, I have been spending the last few weeks extending my previous interactive text on propositional logic (entitied “QED”) to also cover first-order logic.  The text has now reached what seems to be a stable form, with a complete set of deductive rules for first-order logic with equality, and no major bugs as far as I can tell (apart from one weird visual bug I can’t eradicate, in that some graphics elements can occasionally temporarily disappear when one clicks on an item).  So it will likely not change much going forward.

I feel though that there could be more that could be done with this sort of framework (e.g., improved GUI, modification to other logics, developing the ability to write one’s own texts and libraries, exploring mathematical theories such as Peano arithmetic, etc.).  But writing this text (particularly the first-order logic sections) has brought me close to the limit of my programming ability, as the number of bugs introduced with each new feature implemented has begun to grow at an alarming rate.  I would like to repackage the code so that it can be re-used by more adept programmers for further possible applications, though I have never done something like this before and would appreciate advice on how to do so.   The code is already available under a Creative Commons licence, but I am not sure how readable and modifiable it will be to others currently.  [Update: it is now on GitHub.]

[One thing I noticed is that I would probably have to make more of a decoupling between the GUI elements, the underlying logical elements, and the interactive text.  For instance, at some point I made the decision (convenient at the time) to use some GUI elements to store some of the state variables of the text, e.g. the exercise buttons are currently storing the status of what exercises are unlocked or not.  This is presumably not an example of good programming practice, though it would be relatively easy to fix.  More seriously, due to my inability to come up with a good general-purpose matching algorithm (or even specification of such an algorithm) for the the laws of first-order logic, many of the laws have to be hard-coded into the matching routine, so one cannot currently remove them from the text.  It may well be that the best thing to do in fact is to rework the entire codebase from scratch using more professional software design methods.]

[Update, Aug 23: links moved to GitHub version.]

 

 

Birkar, Figalli, Scholze, Venkatesh

Every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), the Fields Medal laureates are announced.     Today, at the 2018 ICM in Rio de Janeiro, it was announced that the Fields Medal was awarded to Caucher Birkar, Alessio Figalli, Peter Scholze, and Akshay Venkatesh.

After the two previous congresses in 2010 and 2014, I wrote blog posts describing some of the work of each of the winners.  This time, though, I happened to be a member of the Fields Medal selection committee, and as such had access to a large number of confidential letters and discussions about the candidates with the other committee members; in order to have the opinions and discussion as candid as possible, it was explicitly understood that these communications would not be publicly disclosed.  Because of this, I will unfortunately not be able to express much of a comment or opinion on the candidates or the process as an individual (as opposed to a joint statement of the committee).  I can refer you instead to the formal citations of the laureates (which, as a committee member, I was involved in crafting, and then signing off on), or the profiles of the laureates by Quanta magazine; see also the short biographical videos of the laureates by the Simons Foundation that accompanied the formal announcements of the winners. I am sure, though, that there will be plenty of other mathematicians who will be able to present the work of each of the medalists (for instance, there was a laudatio given at the ICM for each of the winners, which should eventually be made available at this link).

I know that there is a substantial amount of interest in finding out more about the inner workings of the Fields Medal selection process.  For the reasons stated above, I as an individual will unfortunately be unable to answer any questions about this process (e.g., I cannot reveal any information about other nominees, or of any comparisons between any two candidates or nominees).  I think I can safely express the following two personal opinions though.  Firstly, while I have served on many prize committees in the past, the process for the Fields Medal committee was by far the most thorough and deliberate of any I have been part of, and I for one learned an astonishing amount about the mathematical work of all of the shortlisted nominees, which was an absolutely essential component of the deliberations, in particular giving the discussions a context which would have been very difficult to obtain for an individual mathematician not in possession of all the confidential letters, presentations, and other information available to the committee (in particular, some of my preconceived impressions about the nominees going into the process had to be corrected in light of this more complete information).  Secondly, I believe the four medalists are all extremely deserving recipients of the prize, and I fully stand by the decision of the committee to award the Fields medals this year to these four.

I’ll leave the comments to this post open for anyone who wishes to discuss the work of the medalists.  But, for the reasons above, I will not participate in the discussion myself.

[Edit, Aug 1: looks like the ICM site is (barely) up and running now, so links have been added.  At this time of writing, there does not seem to be an online announcement of the composition of the committee, but this should appear in due course. -T.]

[Edit, Aug 9: the composition of the Fields Medal Committee for 2018 (which included myself) can be found here. -T.]