Machine Learning meets Number Theory: The Data Science of Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer

Understand

Empirical analysis is often the first step towards the birth of a conjecture.

• This is the case of the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer (BSD) Conjecture describing the rational points on an elliptic curve, one of the most celebrated unsolved problems in mathematics.
• Here we extend the original empirical approach, to the analysis of the Cremona database of quantities relevant to BSD, inspecting more than 2.5 million elliptic curves by means of the latest techniques in data science, machine-learning and topological data analysis.
• Key quantities such as rank, Weierstrass coefficients, period, conductor, Tamagawa number, regulator and order of the Tate-Shafarevich group give rise to a high-dimensional point-cloud whose statistical properties we investigate.