Olga Taussky-Todd’s work in class field theory

Abstract

Olga Taussky’s interest in class field theory began when she was a student with Ph. Furtwangler at the University of Vienna (she received her doctorate under his supervision in 1930). At this time, E. Artin, using his general reciprocity law, reformulated the “Principal Ideal Theorem” as a purely grouptheoretic question regarding the triviality of the “Verlagerung” homomorphism from a finite group to its commutator subgroup. Since Furtwangler had been developing group theoretic methods in his own number theoretic investigations, Artin communicated this new idea to him. This was considered to be one of the central problems in the subject at the time, and so there was a good deal of excitement when Furtwangler eventually succeeded in proving the result using this new approach. Olga Taussky had been looking for a thesis topic and Furtwangler suggested several questions related to the finer structure of the Principal Ideal Theorem. The optimistic atmosphere, and the prospect of contributing at the frontiers of class field theory, sparked in Olga a deep interest in this problem which lasted her entire career. She returned to the questions of “capitulation”, a term coined by one of her co-authors Arnold Scholz, several times in her life, always with the sense that these were questions of deep arithmetic significance. I believe that it was the experience of her early contact with class field theory which dominated her research interests in number theory and which provided her a fertile source of inspiration for most of her career. I will describe some of her work in this area below. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the referee for many valuable suggestions. For a number field F , (i.e., an extension of finite degree over the rational field Q) its Hilbert class field H = H(F ) is the maximal Galois extension of F which is everywhere unramified and whose Galois group Gal(H/F ) is abelian. It is a consequence of Artin’s reciprocity law that Gal(H/F ) is isomorphic to the ideal class group C(F ) of F. The Principal Ideal Theorem is the statement that every ideal of F becomes a principal ideal when considered