Twists of Elliptic Curves

In this note we extend the theory of twists of elliptic curves as presented in various standard texts for characteristic not equal to two or three to the remaining characteristics. For this, we make explicit use of the correspondence between the twists and the Galois cohomology set $H^1\big(\operatorname{G}_{\overline{K}/K}, \operatorname{Aut}_{\overline{K}}(E)\big)$. The results are illustrated by examples

The level of pairs of polynomials

Given a polynomial $f$ with coefficients in a field of prime characteristic $p$, it is known that there exists a differential operator that raises $1/f$ to its $p$th power. We first discuss a relation between the `level' of this differential operator and the notion of `stratification' in the case of hyperelliptic curves. Next we extend the notion of level to that of a pair of polynomials. We prove some basic properties and we compute this level in certain special cases. In particular we present examples of polynomials $g$ and $f$ such that there is no differential operator raising $g/f$ to its $p$th power.Comment: 14 pages, comments are welcom

Hesse Pencils and 3-Torsion Structures

This paper intends to focus on the universal property of this Hesse pencil and of its twists. The main goal is to do this as explicit and elementary as possible, and moreover to do it in such a way that it works in every characteristic different from three

Variations for Some Painlev\'e Equations

This paper first discusses irreducibility of a Painlev\'e equation $P$. We explain how the Painlev\'e property is helpful for the computation of special classical and algebraic solutions. As in a paper of Morales-Ruiz we associate an autonomous Hamiltonian $\mathbb{H}$ to a Painlev\'e equation $P$. Complete integrability of $\mathbb{H}$ is shown to imply that all solutions to $P$ are classical (which includes algebraic), so in particular $P$ is solvable by ''quadratures''. Next, we show that the variational equation of $P$ at a given algebraic solution coincides with the normal variational equation of $\mathbb{H}$ at the corresponding solution. Finally, we test the Morales-Ramis theorem in all cases $P_{2}$ to $P_{5}$ where algebraic solutions are present, by showing how our results lead to a quick computation of the component of the identity of the differential Galois group for the first two variational equations. As expected there are no cases where this group is commutative