p-Adic estimates of Hamming weights in Abelian codes over Galois rings

A generalization of McEliece's theorem on the p-adic valuation of Hamming weights of words in cyclic codes is proved in this paper by means of counting polynomial techniques introduced by Wilson along with a technique known as trace-averaging introduced here. The original theorem of McEliece concerned cyclic codes over prime fields. Delsarte and McEliece later extended this to Abelian codes over finite fields. Calderbank, Li, and Poonen extended McEliece's original theorem to cover cyclic codes over the rings /spl Zopf//sub 2//sup d/, Wilson strengthened their results and extended them to cyclic codes over /spl Zopf//sub p//sup d/, and Katz strengthened Wilson's results and extended them to Abelian codes over /spl Zopf//sub p//sup d/. It is natural to ask whether there is a single analogue of McEliece's theorem which correctly captures the behavior of codes over all finite fields and all rings of integers modulo prime powers. In this paper, this question is answered affirmatively: a single theorem for Abelian codes over Galois rings is presented. This theorem contains all previously mentioned results and more

Transversally Elliptic Operators

We construct certain spectral triples in the sense of A. ~Connes and H. \~Moscovici (``The local index formula in noncommutative geometry'' {\it Geom. Funct. Anal.}, 5(2):174--243, 1995) that is transversally elliptic but not necessarily elliptic. We prove that these spectral triples satisfie the conditions which ensure the Connes-Moscovici local index formula applies. We show that such a spectral triple has discrete dimensional spectrum. A notable feature of the spectral triple is that its corresponding zeta functions have multiple poles, while in the classical elliptic cases only simple poles appear for the zeta functions. We show that the multiplicities of the poles of the zeta functions have an upper bound, which is the sum of dimensions of the base manifold and the acting compact Lie group. Moreover for our spectral triple the Connes-Moscovici local index formula involves only local transverse symbol of the operator.Comment: Updated 11/25/2003 with corrected format, and in 12pt fonts Updated 5/20/2004, major reorganizatio

Amicable pairs and aliquot cycles for elliptic curves

An amicable pair for an elliptic curve E/Q is a pair of primes (p,q) of good reduction for E satisfying #E(F_p) = q and #E(F_q) = p. In this paper we study elliptic amicable pairs and analogously defined longer elliptic aliquot cycles. We show that there exist elliptic curves with arbitrarily long aliqout cycles, but that CM elliptic curves (with j not 0) have no aliqout cycles of length greater than two. We give conjectural formulas for the frequency of amicable pairs. For CM curves, the derivation of precise conjectural formulas involves a detailed analysis of the values of the Grossencharacter evaluated at a prime ideal P in End(E) having the property that #E(F_P) is prime. This is especially intricate for the family of curves with j = 0.Comment: 53 page

A Short Survey of Noncommutative Geometry

We give a survey of selected topics in noncommutative geometry, with some emphasis on those directly related to physics, including our recent work with Dirk Kreimer on renormalization and the Riemann-Hilbert problem. We discuss at length two issues. The first is the relevance of the paradigm of geometric space, based on spectral considerations, which is central in the theory. As a simple illustration of the spectral formulation of geometry in the ordinary commutative case, we give a polynomial equation for geometries on the four dimensional sphere with fixed volume. The equation involves an idempotent e, playing the role of the instanton, and the Dirac operator D. It expresses the gamma five matrix as the pairing between the operator theoretic chern characters of e and D. It is of degree five in the idempotent and four in the Dirac operator which only appears through its commutant with the idempotent. It determines both the sphere and all its metrics with fixed volume form. We also show using the noncommutative analogue of the Polyakov action, how to obtain the noncommutative metric (in spectral form) on the noncommutative tori from the formal naive metric. We conclude on some questions related to string theory.Comment: Invited lecture for JMP 2000, 45