Solvable points on smooth projective varieties (Q293076)

The question of whether or not an algebraic variety has points defined over a solvable extension of the ground field is an old and noble one, going back in some sense to the days of Galois and Abel and the quest for the solvability of the quintic polynomial in one variable. The paper under consideration proves a wonderful and very general result, namely that if the dimension of the variety \(X\) is large enough compared to the degree (namely, \(\dim X\geq 2^{2^{\deg X}}\)), then the variety contains a point defined over some solvable extension of the base field, provided that the base field has characteristic zero. The techniques used are, in the author's words, ``simple'', but they rest on some fairly sophisticated mathematics. The central strategy is to notice that smooth varieties of small degree are complete intersections with annihilating ideals defined over the base field (due to \textit{T. D. Browning} and \textit{D. R. Heath-Brown} [``Forms in many variables and differing degrees'', \url{arXiv:1403.5937}], and \textit{A. Bertram} et al. [J. Am. Math. Soc. 4, No. 3, 587--602 (1991; Zbl 0762.14012)]), and then apply methods of \textit{R. Brauer} [Bull. Am. Math. Soc. 51, 749--755 (1945; Zbl 0063.00599)] to diagonalise the defining equations and thereby deduce the existence of a solvable point. The author includes various generalizations of his main result as well.