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Mathematics of Computation
Journal of the American Mathematical Society
ISSN 1088-6842(e) ISSN 0025-5718(p)
     

Computer verification of the Ankeny-Artin-Chowla Conjecture for all primes less than $100\,000\,000\,000$

Author(s): A. J. van der Poorten; H. J. J. te Riele; H. C. Williams.
Journal: Math. Comp. 70 (2001), 1311-1328.
MSC (2000): Primary 11A55, 11J70, 11Y40, 11Y65, 11R11
Posted: March 15, 2000
Corrigenda: Math. Comp. 72 (2002), 521-523.
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Abstract: Let $p$ be a prime congruent to 1 modulo 4, and let $t, u$ be rational integers such that $(t+u\sqrt{p}\,)/2$ is the fundamental unit of the real quadratic field $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt{p}\,)$. The Ankeny-Artin-Chowla conjecture (AAC conjecture) asserts that $p$ will not divide $u$. This is equivalent to the assertion that $p$ will not divide $B_{(p-1)/2}$, where $B_{n}$ denotes the $n$th Bernoulli number. Although first published in 1952, this conjecture still remains unproved today. Indeed, it appears to be most difficult to prove. Even testing the conjecture can be quite challenging because of the size of the numbers $t, u$; for example, when $p = 40\,094\,470\,441$, then both $t$ and $u$ exceed $10^{330\,000}$. In 1988 the AAC conjecture was verified by computer for all $p < 10^{9}$. In this paper we describe a new technique for testing the AAC conjecture and we provide some results of a computer run of the method for all primes $p$ up to $10^{11}$.


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Additional Information:

A. J. van der Poorten
Affiliation: Centre for Number Theory Research, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia
Email: alf@math.mq.edu.au

H. J. J. te Riele
Affiliation: CWI, Kruislaan 413, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Email: Herman.te.Riele@cwi.nl

H. C. Williams
Affiliation: Dept. of Computer Science, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada R3T 2N2
Email: williams@cs.umanitoba.ca

DOI: 10.1090/S0025-5718-00-01234-5
PII: S 0025-5718(00)01234-5
Keywords: Periodic continued fraction, function field
Received by editor(s): March 22, 1999
Received by editor(s) in revised form: July 6, 1999
Posted: March 15, 2000
Additional Notes: The first author was supported in part by a grant from the Australian Research Council.
The research of the third author was supported by NSERC Canada grant \#A7649.
Copyright of article: Copyright 2000, American Mathematical Society


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