Note on a theorem of Professor X

Abstract

Between his arrival in Frankfurt in 1922 and and his proof of his famous finiteness theorem for integral points in 1929, Siegel had no publications. He did, however, write a letter to Mordell in 1926 in which he explained a proof of the finiteness of integral points on hyperelliptic curves. Recognizing the importance of this argument (and Siegel's views on publication), Mordell sent the relevant extract to be published under the pseudonym "X".The purpose of this note is to explain how to optimize Siegel's 1926 technique to obtain the following bound. Let K be a number field, S a finite set of places of K, and f ∈ oK,S[t] monic of degree d ≥ 5 with discriminant ∆ f ∈ o × K,S . Then:This improves bounds of Evertse-Silverman and Bombieri-Gubler from 1986 and 2006, respectively.The main point underlying our improvement is that, informally speaking, we insist on "executing the descents in the presence of only one root (and not three) until the last possible moment".