Higher composition laws I: A new view on Gauss composition, and quadratic generalizations

Abstract

Two centuries ago, in his celebrated work Disquisitiones Arithmeticae of 1801, Gauss laid down the beautiful law of composition of integral binary quadratic forms which would play such a critical role in number theory in the decades to follow. Even today, two centuries later, this law of composition still remains one of the primary tools for understanding and computing with the class groups of quadratic orders. It is hence only natural to ask whether higher analogues of this composition law exist that could shed light on the structure of other algebraic number rings and fields. This article forms the first of a series of four articles in which our aim is precisely to develop such “higher composition laws”. In fact, we show that Gauss’s law of composition is only one of at least fourteen composition laws of its kind which yield information on number rings and their class groups. In this paper, we begin by deriving a general law of composition on 2×2×2 cubes of integers, from which we are able to obtain Gauss’s composition law on binary quadratic forms as a simple special case in a manner reminiscent of the group law on plane elliptic curves. We also obtain from this composition law on 2× 2 × 2 cubes four further new laws of composition. These laws of composition are defined on 1) binary cubic forms, 2) pairs of binary quadratic forms, 3) pairs of quaternary alternating 2-forms, and 4) senary (six-variable) alternating 3-forms. More precisely, Gauss’s theorem states that the set of SL2(Z)-equivalence classes of primitive binary quadratic forms of a given discriminant D has an inherent group structure. The five other spaces of forms mentioned above (including the space of 2 × 2 × 2 cubes) also possess natural actions by special linear groups over Z and certain products thereof. We prove that, just like Gauss’s space of binary quadratic forms, each of these group actions has the following remarkable properties. First, each of these six spaces possesses only a single polynomial invariant for the corresponding group action, which we call the discriminant. This discriminant invariant is found to take only values that