Tag Archives: modular form

Trace form 3.32.a.a

When asked if I might contribute an image for MSRI program 332, I thought it would be fun to investigate a modular form with a label roughly formed from the program number, 332. We investigate the trace form 3.32.a.a.

The space of weight $32$ modular forms on $\Gamma_0(3)$ with trivial central character is an $11$-dimensional vector space. The subspace of newforms is a $5$-dimensional vector space.

These newforms break down into two groups: the two embeddings of an abstract newform whose coefficients lie in a quadratic field, and the three embeddings of an abstract newform whose coefficients lie in a cubic field. The label 3.32.a.a is a label for the two newforms with coefficients in a quadratic field.

These images are for the trace form, made by summing the two conjugate newforms in 3.32.a.a. This trace form is a newform of weight $32$ on $\Gamma_1(3)$.

Each modular form is naturally defined on the upper half-plane. In these images, the upper half-plane has been mapped to the unit disk. This mapping is uniquely specified by the following pieces of information: the real line $y = 0$ in the plane is mapped to the boundary of the disk, and the three points $(0, i, \infty)$ map to the (bottom, center, top) of the disk.

This is a relatively high weight modular form, meaning that magnitudes can change very quickly. In the contoured image, each contour indicates a multiplicative change in elevation: points on one contour are $32$ times larger or smaller than points on adjacent contours.

Notes behind a talk: visualizing modular forms

Today, I’ll be at Bowdoin College giving a talk on visualizing modular forms. This is a talk about the actual process and choices involved in illustrating a modular form; it’s not about what little lies one might hold in their head in order to form some mental image of a modular form.1

This is a talk heavily inspired by the ICERM semester program on Illustrating Mathematics (currently wrapping up). In particular, I draw on2 conversations with Frank Farris (about using color to highlight desired features), Elias Wegert (about using logarithmically scaling contours), Ed Harriss (about the choice of colorscheme), and Brendan Hassett (about overall design choices).

There are very many pictures in the talk!

I wrote a few different complex-plotting routines for this project. At their core, they are based on sage’s complex_plot. There are two major variants that I use.

The first (currently called “ccomplex_plot”. Not a good name) overwrites how sage handles lightness in complex_plot in order to produce “contours” at spots where the magnitude is a two-power. These contours are actually a sudden jump in brightness.

The second (currently called “raw_complex_plot”, also not a good name) is even less formal. It vectorizes the computation and produces an object containing the magnitude and argument information for each pixel to be drawn. It then uses numpy and matplotlib to convert these magnitudes and phases into RGB colors according to a matplotlib-compatible colormap.

I am happy to send either of these pieces of code to anyone who wants to see them, but they are very much written for my own use at the moment. I intend to improve them for general use later, after I’ve experimented further.

In addition, I generated all the images for this talk in a single sagemath jupyter notebook (with the two .spyx cython dependencies I allude to above). This is also available here. (Note that using a service like nbviewer or nbconvert to view or convert it to html might be a reasonable idea).

As a final note, I’ll add that I mistyped several times in the preparation of the images for this talk. Included below are a few of the interesting-looking mistakes. The first two resulted from incorrectly applied conformal mappings, while the third came from incorrectly applied color correction.

Posted in Expository, Math.NT, Mathematics, sage, sagemath, sagemath | | 2 Comments

Slides for a talk at JMM 2019

Today, I’m giving a talk on Zeroes of L-functions associated to half-integral weight modular forms, which includes some joint work with Li-Mei Lim and Tom Hulse, and which alludes to other joint work touched on previously with Jeff Hoffstein and Min Lee (and which perhaps should have been finished a few years ago).