The editors of Compositio Mathematica find it appropriate to communicate some information directly to the readers in the form of this editorial.

The journal Compositio Mathematica was founded by Luitzen E. J. Brouwer to counter his dismissal from the Mathematische Annalen in 1928. In spite of the economic crisis, Brouwer succeeded in finding a publisher (Noordhoff), an editorial board and subscribers. The founding took place at the time of the rise of the Third Reich, which caused problems of a political nature. The German editors followed Ludwig Bieberbach in 1934 when he left the board because Brouwer refused to dismiss the Jewish editors. After a period of flourishing, the publication was suspended at the beginning of the occupation of Holland in 1940. The post-war restart of the journal led to a painful conflict between Brouwer and the publisher, which ended with Brouwer's withdrawal from power. After having founded his own journal in the early 1930s, he lost it again some twenty years later.

We explicitly solve a collection of binomial Thue equations with unknown degree and unknown $S$-unit coefficients, for a number of sets $S$ of small cardinality. Equivalently, we characterize integers $x$ such that the polynomial $x^2+x$ assumes perfect power values, modulo $S$-units. These results are proved through a combination of techniques, including Frey curves and associated modular forms, lower bounds for linear forms in logarithms, the hypergeometric method of Thue and Siegel, local methods, and computational approaches to Thue equations of low degree. Along the way, we derive some new results on Fermat-type ternary equations, combining classical cyclotomy with Frey curve techniques.

This paper is devoted to the proof of two results. The first was conjectured in 1994 by the author. It concerns the identity, under certain assumptions, of the universal deformation ring of $p$-nearly ordinary Galois representations and a local component of the universal nearly ordinary Hecke algebra in the sense of Hida. The other, which relies on the first, concerns the modularity of certain abelian surfaces. More precisely, one can associate to certain irreducible abelian surfaces defined over the rationals overconvergent $p$-adic cusp eigenforms. The question of whether these forms are classical is not studied in this paper.

This paper is a continuation of the author's previous work, where we studied one of the inequalities between the characteristic ideal of the Selmer group and the ideal of the $p$-adic $L$-function predicted by the two-variable Iwasawa main conjecture for a nearly ordinary Hida deformation $\mathcal{T}$. In this paper, we study several properties of the Selmer group and the $p$-adic $L$-function solving some of the open questions raised in the author's previous work. As applications, we have an infinite family of elliptic cuspforms where the cyclotomic Iwasawa main conjecture holds for every cuspform in the family.

In this paper, we study bounds for the number of rational points on twists $C'$ of a fixed curve $C$ over a number field ${\mathcal K}$, under the condition that the group of ${\mathcal K}$-rational points on the Jacobian $J'$ of $C'$ has rank smaller than the genus of $C'$. The main result is that with some explicitly given finitely many possible exceptions, we have a bound of the form $2r + c$, where $r$ is the rank of $J'({\mathcal K})$ and $c$ is a constant depending on $C$. For the proof, we use a refinement of the method of Chabauty–Coleman: the main new ingredient is to use it for an extension field of ${\mathcal K}_v$, where $v$ is a place of bad reduction for $C'$.

Silverman has discussed the problem of bounding the Mordell–Weil ranks of elliptic curves over towers of function fields (J. Algebraic Geom. 9 (2000), 301–308; J. reine. angew. Math. 577 (2004), 153–169). We first prove generalizations of the theorems of Silverman by a different method, allowing non-abelian Galois groups and removing the dependence on Tate's conjectures. We then prove some theorems about the growth of Mordell–Weil ranks in towers of function fields whose Galois groups are $p$-adic Lie groups; a natural question is whether the Mordell–Weil rank is bounded in such a tower. We give some Galois-theoretic criteria which guarantee that certain curves ${\mathcal{E}}/{\mathbb{Q}}(t)$ have finite Mordell–Weil rank over ${\mathbb{C}}(t^{p^{-\infty}})$, and show that these criteria are met for elliptic K3 surfaces whose associated Galois representations have sufficiently large image.

We investigate the bounded derived category of coherent sheaves on irreducible singular projective curves of arithmetic genus one. A description of the group of exact auto-equivalences and the set of all $t$-structures of this category is given. We describe the moduli space of stability conditions, obtain a complete classification of all spherical objects in this category and show that the group of exact auto-equivalences acts transitively on them. Harder–Narasimhan filtrations in the sense of Bridgeland are used as our main technical tool.

We conjecture an equivalence between the Gromov–Witten theory of 3-folds and the holomorphic Chern–Simons theory of Donaldson and Thomas. For Calabi–Yau 3-folds, the equivalence is defined by the change of variables $e^{iu}=-q$, where $u$ is the genus parameter of Gromov–Witten theory and $q$ is the Euler characteristic parameter of Donaldson–Thomas theory. The conjecture is proven for local Calabi–Yau toric surfaces.

We discuss the Gromov–Witten/Donaldson–Thomas correspondence for 3-folds in both the absolute and relative cases. Descendents in Gromov–Witten theory are conjectured to be equivalent to Chern characters of the universal sheaf in Donaldson–Thomas theory. Relative constraints in Gromov–Witten theory are conjectured to correspond in Donaldson–Thomas theory to cohomology classes of the Hilbert scheme of points of the relative divisor. Independent of the conjectural framework, we prove degree 0 formulas for the absolute and relative Donaldson–Thomas theories of toric varieties.

We study the product of a Fermat hypersurface $X_0^{p+1}+\dots+X_n^{p+1}=0 \subset \mathbf{P}^n$ with $n \ge 3$ and $\mathbf{P}^1$, embedded in $\mathbf{P}^{2n+1}$ by Segre embedding where $p>0$ is the characteristic of the base field. This smooth variety is nonreflexive and has Gauss map which is an embedding. This gives a negative answer to the following Kleiman–Piene question in any positive characteristic: does the separability of the Gauss map imply reflexivity? The only known smooth examples, which give a negative answer, are given by Kaji in characteristic 2.

We study the infinite-dimensional group of holomorphic diffeomorphisms of certain Stein homogeneous spaces. We show that holomorphic automorphisms can be approximated by generalized shears arising from unipotent subgroups. For the homogeneous spaces this implies the existence of Fatou–Bieberbach domains of the first and second kind, and the failure of the Abhyankar–Moh theorem for holomorphic embeddings.

Let $M$ be an $n$-dimensional complete connected Riemannian manifold with sectional curvature $\operatorname{sec}(M) \geq 1$ and radius $\operatorname{rad}(M)>\pi /2$. In this article, we show that if $\operatorname{conj}(M)$, the conjugate radius of $M$, is not less than $\operatorname{rad}(M)$, then $M$ is isometric to a round sphere of constant curvature.

The colored Jones polynomial is a function $J_K:{\mathbb{N}}\longrightarrow{\mathbb{Z}}[t,t^{-1}]$ associated with a knot $K$ in 3-space. We will show that for an alternating knot $K$ the absolute values of the first and the last three leading coefficients of $J_K(n)$ are independent of $n$ when $n$ is sufficiently large. Computation of sample knots indicates that this should be true for any fixed leading coefficient of the colored Jones polynomial for alternating knots. As a corollary we get a volume-ish theorem for the colored Jones polynomial.

Quasipositive knots are transverse intersections of complex plane curves with the standard sphere $S^3 \subset {\mathbb C}^2$. It is known that any Alexander polynomial of a knot can be realized by a quasipositive knot. As a consequence, the Alexander polynomial cannot detect quasipositivity. In this paper we prove a similar result about Vassiliev invariants: for any oriented knot $K$ and any natural number $n$ there exists a quasipositive knot $Q$ whose Vassiliev invariants of order less than or equal to $n$ coincide with those of $K$.