Activities This Week

For a smooth projective hyperbolic curve Y/Q the set of rational points Y(Q) is finite by Faltings’ Theorem. Grothendieck’s section conjecture predicts that this set can be described via Galois sections of the étale fundamental group of Y. On the other hand, the non-abelian Chabauty method produces p-adic analytic functions which conjecturally cut out Y(Q) as a subset of Y(Qp). We relate the two conjectures and discuss the example of the thrice-punctured line, where non-abelian Chabauty is used to prove a local-to-glocal principle for the section conjecture.

We study the notion of Dirichlet improvability in a variety of settings and make a comparison study between Dirichlet-improvable numbers and badly-approximable numbers as initiated by Davenport-Schmidt. The question we try to answer, in each of the settings, is – whether the set of badly-approximable numbers is contained in the set of Dirichlet-improvable numbers. We show how this translates into a question about the possible limit points of bounded orbits in the space of two-dimensional lattices under the diagonal flow. Our main result gives a construction of a full Hausdorff dimension set of lattices with bounded orbit and with a prescribed limit point. Joint work with Dmitry Kleinbock.