We give an asymptotic formula for the number of elliptic curves over ℚ with bounded Faltings height. Silverman (1986) showed that the Faltings height for elliptic curves over number fields can be expressed in terms of modular functions and the minimal discriminant of the elliptic curve. We use this to recast the problem as one of counting lattice points in a particular region in ℝ².
Let be an elliptic curve defined over with conductor and denote by the modular parametrization:In this paper, we are concerned with the critical and ramification points of . In particular, we explain how we can obtain a more or less experimental study of these points.
We consider the Diophantine equation , where B, D are integers (B ≠ ±2, D ≠ 0) and p is a prime >5. We give Kraus type criteria of nonsolvability for this equation (explicitly, for many B and D) in terms of Galois representations and modular forms. We apply these criteria to numerous equations (with B = 0, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, specific D’s, and p ∈ (10,10⁶)). In the last section we discuss reductions of the above Diophantine equations to those of signature (p,p,2).