bound for the rank of an elliptic curve
Theorem.
Let be an elliptic curve given by the equation:
and suppose that has primes of bad reduction, with and being the number of primes with multiplicative and additive reduction respectively. Then the rank of , denoted by , satisfies:
Example.
As an application of the theorem above, we can prove that has only finitely many rational solutions. Indeed, the discriminant of , , is only divisible by , which is a prime of (bad) multiplicative reduction. Therefore . Moreover, the Nagell-Lutz theorem implies that the only torsion points on are those of order . Hence, the only rational points on are:
References
- 1 James Milne, Elliptic Curves, online course notes.
http://www.jmilne.org/math/CourseNotes/math679.htmlhttp://www.jmilne.org/math/CourseNotes/math679.html