Ishitsuka et al. [‘Explicit calculation of the mod 4 Galois representation associated with the Fermat quartic’, Int. J. Number Theory 16(4) (2020), 881–905] found all points on the Fermat quartic ${F_4\colon x^4+y^4=z^4}$ over quadratic extensions of ${\mathbb {Q}}(\zeta _8)$, where $\zeta _8$ is the eighth primitive root of unity $e^{i\pi /4}$. Using Mordell’s technique, we give an alternative proof for the result of Ishitsuka et al. and extend it to the rational function field ${\mathbb {Q}}({\zeta _8})(T_1,T_2,\ldots ,T_n)$.

We prove analogs of the Bezout and the Bernstein–Kushnirenko–Khovanskii theorems for systems of algebraic differential conditions over differentially closed fields. Namely, given a system of algebraic conditions on the first $l$ derivatives of an $n$-tuple of functions, which admits finitely many solutions, we show that the number of solutions is bounded by an appropriate constant (depending singly-exponentially on $n$ and $l$) times the volume of the Newton polytope of the set of conditions. This improves a doubly-exponential estimate due to Hrushovski and Pillay. We illustrate the application of our estimates in two diophantine contexts: to counting transcendental lattice points on algebraic subvarieties of semi-abelian varieties, following Hrushovski and Pillay; and to counting the number of intersections between isogeny classes of elliptic curves and algebraic varieties, following Freitag and Scanlon. In both cases we obtain bounds which are singly-exponential (improving the known doubly-exponential bounds) and which exhibit the natural asymptotic growth with respect to the degrees of the equations involved.

Following a recent paper by Faltings, we study the integral points on $\bm{P}_2\setminus\mathcal{D}$, where $\mathcal{D}$ is the branch locus of a projection from a surface $\mathcal{X}$; a crucial point in the analysis is that the pull-back of $\mathcal{D}$ in the Galois closure of the projection often splits into several components. As in the paper by Faltings, under certain assumptions we obtain finiteness of the integral points (Theorem 3.1); for instance, we shall find that it suffices if the projection is sufficiently general and if $\mathcal{X}$ has Kodaira number $\ge0$ (Corollary 4.1). We have borrowed freely from Faltings’s paper, for the whole geometrical setting. As to the arithmetic, our method is in part different, relying on the recent paper by Corvaja and Zannier and leading to apparently new conditions. We shall also use a more elementary approach to study a similar situation in arbitrary dimension, where the projection is taken from a hypersurface (Theorem 2.1).

In concrete terms, these results deal with certain diophantine equations $F(x_0,\dots,x_n)=c$.

AMS 2000 Mathematics subject classification: Primary 11D72; 11G35; 11G99

Nous démontrons une nouvelle minoration de la hauteur normalisée d’une sous-variété algébrique d’un tore multiplicatif (et par conséquent des petits points d’une telle sous-variété). Si dans le cas torique, une preuve effective de la conjecture de Bogomolov généralisée était déjà connue ainsi que des estimations “pluri-exponentielles” en le degré de la variété (Schmidt et Bombieri–Zannier), puis monomiales inverses (par le deuxième auteur et Philippon), notre approche qui est entièrement nouvelle, permet de démontrer à un $\varepsilon$-près les conjectures les plus précises (en fonction du degré) que l’on peut formuler dans ce cadre. On obtient ainsi pour ce problème l’exact analogue de ce que l’on sait obtenir dans le cadre du problème de Lehmer. Enfin, nous démontrons pour les sous-variétés de codimension au moins 2 une conjecture du deuxième auteur et Philippon.

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.