Turning Washington’s Heuristics in Favor of Vandiver’s Conjecture

DOI10.1007/978-3-642-28821-0_12zbMATH Open1327.11078arXiv1011.6283OpenAlexW2127707935MaRDI QIDQ5261066FDOQ5261066

Preda Mihaĭlescu

Publication date: 1 July 2015

Published in: Essays in Mathematics and its Applications (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: A famous conjecture bearing the name of Vandiver states that $pmid{h}_p^{+}$ in the $p$ - cyclotomic extension of $Q$. Heuristics arguments of Washington, which have been briefly exposed in Lang (1978), p. 261 and Washington (1996), p. 158 suggest that the Vandiver conjecture should be false if certain conditions of statistical independence are fulfilled. In this note, we assume that Greenberg's conjecture is true for the th{p} cyclotomic extensions and prove an elementary consequence of the assumption that Vandiver's conjecture fails for a certain value of $p$: the result indicates that there are deep correlations between this fact and the defect $lambd{a}^{-}>i(p)$, where $i(p)$ is like usual the irregularity index of $p$, i.e. the number of Bernoulli numbers $$. As a consequence, this result could turn Washington's heuristic arguments, in a certain sense into an argument in favor of Vandiver's conjecture.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.6283

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zbMATH Keywords

class groupcyclotomic fieldsVandiver's conjecture

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Class numbers, class groups, discriminants (11R29) Cyclotomic extensions (11R18)

Cited In (1)

• The Vandiver conjecture and a new conjecture on the distribution of irregular primes

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