The remaining cases of the Kramer-Tunnell conjecture

For an elliptic curve $E$ over a local field $K$ and a separable quadratic extension of $K$, motivated by connections to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, Kramer and Tunnell have conjectured a formula for computing the local root number of the base change of $E$ to the quadratic extension in terms of a certain norm index. The formula is known in all cases except some when $K$ is of characteristic $2$, and we complete its proof by reducing the positive characteristic case to characteristic $0$. For this reduction, we exploit the principle that local fields of characteristic $p$ can be approximated by finite extensions of $\mathbb{Q}_p$--we find an elliptic curve $E'$ defined over a $p$-adic field such that all the terms in the Kramer-Tunnell formula for $E'$ are equal to those for $E$.Comment: 13 pages; final version, to appear in Compositio Mathematic

GraphTool : a tool for interactive design and manipulation of graphs and graph algorithms

GraphTool is an interactive tool for editing graphs and visualizing the execution and results of graph algorithms. It runs under both the SunView and X Windows environments and has a full window/mouse interface which is as similar as possible for the two windowing systems. In addition, there is a standalone program called the Wrapper which simulates the Graph-Tool interface without graphics for batch processing of graph algorithms. While the primary purpose of GraphTool is to provide a means for experimentally investigating the performance of graph algorithms, it has other useful features as well. It provides features for printing graphs in a visually appealing format, which makes it easier to prepare papers for publication. It also provides a facility for "animating" algorithms, which means that it can be used in computer assisted instruction (CAI) and for preparing video presentations of algorithms

Number fields unramified away from 2

We consider finite extensions of the rationals which are unramified except for at 2 and infinity. We show there are no such extensions of degrees 9 through 15

Extending Immersions into the Sphere

We study the problem to extend an immersed circle f in the 2-dimensional sphere to an immersion of the disc. We analyze existence and uniqueness for this problems in terms of the combinatorial structure of a word assigned to f. Our techniques are based on ideas of Blank who studied the extension problem in case of a planar target

A parallel edge orientation algorithm for quadrilateral meshes

One approach to achieving correct finite element assembly is to ensure that the local orientation of facets relative to each cell in the mesh is consistent with the global orientation of that facet. Rognes et al. have shown how to achieve this for any mesh composed of simplex elements, and deal.II contains a serial algorithm to construct a consistent orientation of any quadrilateral mesh of an orientable manifold. The core contribution of this paper is the extension of this algorithm for distributed memory parallel computers, which facilitates its seamless application as part of a parallel simulation system. Furthermore, our analysis establishes a link between the well-known Union-Find algorithm and the construction of a consistent orientation of a quadrilateral mesh. As a result, existing work on the parallelisation of the Union-Find algorithm can be easily adapted to construct further parallel algorithms for mesh orientations.Comment: Second revision: minor change

On a general implementation of hh- and pp-adaptive curl-conforming finite elements

Edge (or N\'ed\'elec) finite elements are theoretically sound and widely used by the computational electromagnetics community. However, its implementation, specially for high order methods, is not trivial, since it involves many technicalities that are not properly described in the literature. To fill this gap, we provide a comprehensive description of a general implementation of edge elements of first kind within the scientific software project FEMPAR. We cover into detail how to implement arbitrary order (i.e., $p$-adaptive) elements on hexahedral and tetrahedral meshes. First, we set the three classical ingredients of the finite element definition by Ciarlet, both in the reference and the physical space: cell topologies, polynomial spaces and moments. With these ingredients, shape functions are automatically implemented by defining a judiciously chosen polynomial pre-basis that spans the local finite element space combined with a change of basis to automatically obtain a canonical basis with respect to the moments at hand. Next, we discuss global finite element spaces putting emphasis on the construction of global shape functions through oriented meshes, appropriate geometrical mappings, and equivalence classes of moments, in order to preserve the inter-element continuity of tangential components of the magnetic field. Finally, we extend the proposed methodology to generate global curl-conforming spaces on non-conforming hierarchically refined (i.e., $h$-adaptive) meshes with arbitrary order finite elements. Numerical results include experimental convergence rates to test the proposed implementation