arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Sam Vandervelde.
In this paper we demonstrate how to partition the real number line into four subsets which may be reassembled, via "piecewise rigid functions" that preserve Lebesgue measure, into two copies of the line. We then employ a similar process to split the line into $2k$ pieces that yield $k$ copies of the line, or even into countably many subsets to obtain countably many copies of $\mathbb{R}$.
In 1958 E. Lehmer found an explicit description of those primes p for which a given prime q is a cubic residue. In this paper we demonstrate that a similar result may be obtained for cubic nonresidues, yielding a cubic character for fixed p that provides an effective means for ascertaining whether or not an arbitrary integer c is a cubic residue modulo p. As an illustration of this technique, we determine whether 1982 is a cubic residue modulo the 131-digit prime p=(3^19+5^82)/4, a question which is essentially impossible to answer with Lehmer's original criterion.
Our aim is to explain instances in which the value of the logarithmic Mahler measure of a polynomial can be written in an unexpectedly neat manner. To this end we examine polynomials defining rational curves, which allows their zero-locus to be parametrized. In these instances the unusual simplification is a consequence of the Galois descent property for Bloch groups. This principle enables one to explain why the arguments of the dilogarithm function depend only on the points where the rational curve intersects the torus |x|=|y|=1. In the process we also present a general method for computing the Mahler measure of any parametrizable polynomial.