On the paramodularity of typical abelian surfaces

Abstract

Generalizing the method of Faltings-Serre, we rigorously verify that certain abelian surfaces without extra endomorphisms are paramodular. To compute the required Hecke eigenvalues, we develop a method of specialization of Siegel paramodular forms to modular curves. In the appendix, Serre proves a result extending his work on the reduction of G-invariant bilinear forms modulo primes to the case of G-covariant forms.