Kac introduced the notion of the canonical decomposition for a dimension vector of a quiver. Here we will give an efficient algorithm to compute the canonical decomposition. Our study of the canonical decomposition for quivers with three vertices gives us fractal-like pictures.

We remove the assumption ‘p≠ 2 or k is totally imaginary’ from several well-known theorems on Galois groups with restricted ramification of number fields. For example, we show that the Galois group of the maximal extension of a number field k which is unramified outside 2 has finite cohomological 2-dimension (also if k has real places).

We consider an embedded modular curve in a locally symmetric space M attached to an orthogonal group of signature (p, 2) and associate to it a nonholomorphic elliptic modular form by integrating a certain theta function over the modular curve. We compute the Fourier expansion and identify the generating series of the (suitably defined) intersection numbers of the Heegner divisors in M with the modular curve as the holomorphic part of the modular form. This recovers and generalizes parts of work of Hirzebruch and Zagier.

After establishing some important results on the usual height of projective varieties in positive characteristic, we construct a normalized height for subvarieties of products of Drinfeld modules and investigate its properties. In case the Drinfeld modules are pairwise isogeneous, we obtain in particular that the normalized height vanishes exactly on torsion varieties, that is on translates of sub-T-modules by torsion points.