Ramification in the Coates-Wiles tower.
We construct a family of elliptic curves with six parameters, arising from a system of Diophantine equations, whose rank is at least five. To do so, we use the Brahmagupta formula for the area of cyclic quadrilaterals (p³,q³,r³,s³) not necessarily representing genuine geometric objects. It turns out that, as parameters of the curves, the integers p,q,r,s along with the extra integers u,v satisfy u⁶+v⁶+p⁶+q⁶ = 2(r⁶+s⁶), uv = pq, which, by previous work, has infinitely many integer solutions.
We report on a large-scale project to investigate the ranks of elliptic curves in a quadratic twist family, focussing on the congruent number curve. Our methods to exclude candidate curves include 2-Selmer, 4-Selmer, and 8-Selmer tests, the use of the Guinand-Weil explicit formula, and even 3-descent in a couple of cases. We find that rank 6 quadratic twists are reasonably common (though still quite difficult to find), while rank 7 twists seem much more rare. We also describe our inability to find...