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Problem 4-2 in https://www.jmilne.org/math/CourseNotes/FT.pdf asks

"It is a thought-provoking question that few graduate students would know how toapproach the question of determining the Galois group of, say, $$X^6+2X^5+3X^4+4X^3+5X^2+6X+7"$$

How would one actually solve this problem without using existing software that automatically calculates Galois groups?


I verified the polynomial is irreducible and I looked up the subgroup lattice of $S_6$ for groups transitive on 6 points. I calculated it's discriminant and checked that it was a nonsquare which eliminated some options. I made an attempt to check factorizations mod various primes and try to identify what group it is likely to be but I got the wrong answer from this and this approach would only give a lower bound on the group anyway.


For reference here is the factorizations mod 3,5 and 13:

? lift(factor(Mod(X^6+2*X^5+3*X^4+4*X^3+5*X^2+6*X+7,3)))
%2 = 
[X^6 + 2*X^5 + X^3 + 2*X^2 + 1 1]

? lift(factor(Mod(X^6+2X^5+3X^4+4X^3+5X^2+6*X+7,5))) %3 = [ X^3 + X + 4 1]

[X^3 + 2X^2 + 2X + 3 1]

? lift(factor(Mod(X^6+2X^5+3X^4+4X^3+5X^2+6*X+7,13))) %4 = [ X + 11 1]

[X^5 + 4X^4 + 11X^3 + 5*X + 3 1]

Which gives cycle types (6), (3,3) and (1,5).


I found the polynomial is equal to $$\frac{x^8 - 8 x + 7}{(x-1)^2}$$

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    The polynomial is of a very special form. This might be helpful (compare, say, with this post). – Dietrich Burde Aug 13 '20 at 13:46
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    Thanks, I notice that f(x)*(x-1) + 8 - (x^8-1)/(x-1) –  Aug 13 '20 at 14:00
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    Irreducibility of this family of polynomials discussed here. Approach0 gives many hits. Also on the AOPS side as they made an appearance in Putnam. Nothing about the Galois group in general. – Jyrki Lahtonen Aug 15 '20 at 04:28
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    The Galois group of this specific polynomial was discussed here. The asker concluding that we don't have the full symmetric group here. – Jyrki Lahtonen Aug 15 '20 at 04:34
  • @JyrkiLahtonen Great resources! Thank you. pari/gp's polgalois gives me something other than S_6. –  Aug 15 '20 at 06:08
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    Testing with a few more primes gives cycle type $(4,1,1)$ modulo $p=19$ or $23$ and $(2,2,1,1)$ modulo $p=61$. I could run it for a few hundred primes and build enough statistics to apply Chebotarev guesstimate on it, but at this point I'm willing to revise my prediction, and guess that the Galois group is a transitive copy of $S_5$ inside $S_6$. It sure looks like the point stabilizer is isomorphic to $C_5\rtimes C_4$. – Jyrki Lahtonen Aug 15 '20 at 07:17
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    May be this sextic is a resolvent of some quintic with Galois group $S_5$? – Jyrki Lahtonen Aug 15 '20 at 07:40
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    I don't have a working computer algebra system to try this on right now, but here is an approach to prove @JyrkiLahtonen 's guess: We have $S_5 \cong PGL_2(\mathbb{F}5)$, and the transitive copy of $S_5$ inside $S_6$ is the action of $PGL_2(\mathbb{F}_5)$ on $\mathbb{P}^1(\mathbb{F}_5)$. The polynomial $R:=\sum{g \in PGL_2(\mathbb{F}5)} x{g(\infty)}^2 x_{g(0)}^2 x_{g(1)} x_{g(4)}$ is $PGL_2(\mathbb{F}_5)$-invariant and not $S_6$ invariant. So, if Jyrki is right, $R$ should be a polynomial in the roots which takes a rational value, even though it is not a symmetric polynomial. (continued) – David E Speyer Aug 19 '20 at 14:56
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    Moreover, since our original polynomial is monic, if $R$ is rational, then it is an integer. I would first try numerically computing $R$ to see if it looked likely to be an integer. Of course, I don't know how to biject the $6$ roots of the original polynomial with $\mathbb{P}^1(\mathbb{F}_5)$, but I only need to try one option in each $PGL_2(\mathbb{F}_5)$ orbit, so there are only $6$ bijections to try. – David E Speyer Aug 19 '20 at 14:58
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    If the numeric check looked good, I would then compute the coefficients of the sextic polynomial $\prod_{h \in S_6/PGL_2(\mathbb{F}5)} \left( t - \sum{g \in PGL_2(\mathbb{F}5)} x{hg(\infty)}^2 x_{hg(0)}^2 x_{hg(1)} x_{hg(4)} \right)$, which will be integers. (Here the product is over coset representatives, and there is a risk that I have screwed up right and left cosets.) Using the rational root theorem, I can see if this sextic has an integer root, thus proving the guess from the numeric evidence. – David E Speyer Aug 19 '20 at 15:01
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    Unfortunately, we really have to go up to sextics for this strategy: I used Molien's formula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molien_series , and, for $d \leq 5$, the space of $PGL_2(\mathbb{F}_5)$ invariants of degree $d$ has the same dimension (and thus must equal) the space of $S_6$ invariants. – David E Speyer Aug 19 '20 at 15:03
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    @DavidESpeyer Thanks for the ideas. I may try my hand at implementing this. Do you happen to know whether that approach can be (has been?) turned into an algorithm for calculating the Galois group over rationals when the roots are known with (sufficiently) high precision? This asker has a related question on that theme. – Jyrki Lahtonen Aug 19 '20 at 16:16
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    @JyrkiLahtonen Yes, it can. This is basically the method of resolvents applied to this case. Describing all the details gets messy and I've never found a good source (and it is quite possible I haven't thought them all through myself). I'll write more when I have more time. – David E Speyer Aug 19 '20 at 16:23
  • $R \in \mathbb C$ right, it's not a function or polynomial? (and if our Galois group is what we expect, then it will even be an integer). –  Aug 19 '20 at 16:27
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    @JyrkiLahtonen I did some googling, and I found this nice note by Alex Healy http://www.alexhealy.net/papers/math250a.pdf – David E Speyer Aug 19 '20 at 18:21
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    Thanks @DavidESpeyer. Will take a look. Meanwhile, I found the right permutation and managed to carry out your program. Not much to it after you explained how to do it. This group is 3-transitive, which makes the search somewhat simpler. – Jyrki Lahtonen Aug 19 '20 at 19:02

2 Answers2

7

This is a summary of my calculations based on the comments by David E. Speyer. I used a different description of the Galois group, but that doesn't matter.


The basic tool in use (see the earlier comments) is Dedekind's theorem relating factorizations of $$ f(x)= x^6 + 2 x^5 + 3 x^4 + 4 x^3 + 5 x^2 + 6 x + 7 $$ modulo various (unramified) primes to the cycle structure of elements of the Galois group $G$ as permutations of the roots (here six, so $G\le S_6$). As explained by the OP

  • Modulo $p=3$ $f(x)$ is irreducible, so there is a 6-cycle in $G$. In particular $G$ is transitive and $f(x)$ is also irreducible over $\Bbb{Q}$.
  • Modulo $p=11$ $f(x)$ splits as a product of a linear and a quintic, implying that $G$ contains a 5-cycle. Therefore the point stabilizer of $G$ among the set of roots acts transitively among the remaining roots, and $G$ is doubly transitive.
  • The testing I did revealed that modulo $p=19$ $f(x)$ splits as a product of two linear factors and an irreducible quartic. Therefore $G$ contains a 4-cycle, and we can also conclude that $G$ is a triply transitive subgroup of $S_6$.
  • More testing only gave cycle structures that are powers of the already listed, so this suggested that $G$ might be a transitive copy of $S_5$ inside $S_6$. It turns out that this is true. Let's record the fact that we already know $G$ to have order at least $120$.

I constructed that copy of $S_5$ from its conjugation action on its six Sylow $5$-groups: $P_1=\langle(12345)\rangle$, $P_2=\langle(12354)\rangle$, $P_3=\langle(12435)\rangle$, $P_4=\langle(12453)\rangle$, $P_5=\langle(12534)\rangle$ and $P_6=\langle(12543)\rangle$.

The group $S_5$ is generated by $\alpha=(12345)\in P_1$ and $\beta=(45)$. Conjugation action by $\alpha$ permutes the subscripts of the $P_i$s according to $a=(24653)$ whereas conjugation by $\beta$ permutes the Sylow-$5$s according to $b=(12)(35)(46)$. It follows that a desired copy of $S_5$ is the group $$ \tilde{G}=\langle(24653),(12)(35)(46)\rangle. $$ Using a suitable CAS (I used Mathematica) it is then straight forward to generate a list of elements of $\tilde{G}$.

David E. Speyer's idea is that the polynomial $$ P(x_1,x_2,\ldots,x_6)=\sum_{g\in \tilde{G}}x_{g(1)}^2x_{g(2)}^2x_{g(3)}x_{g(4)} $$ is invariant under $\tilde{G}$ but isn't invariant under $S_6$. Because $\tilde{G}$ is a maximal subgroup of $S_6$ we can use $P$ to distinguish the Galois groups $\tilde{G}$ and $S_6$. Namely, if $P$ evaluated at a carefully chosen permutation of the roots of $f(x)$ produces an integer, then that equation must be respected by the Galois group $G$, implying $G=\tilde{G}$.

Mathematica kindly gave me approximate zeros, and those are (rounded to only 4 decimals to save space) $$ \begin{aligned} z_1\approx-1.3079-0.5933i,&&z_2=\overline{z_1},\\ z_3\approx-0.4025-1.3417i,&&z_4=\overline{z_3},\\ z_5\approx\hphantom{-}0.7104-1.1068i,&&z_6=\overline{z_5}. \end{aligned} $$ Which permutation of these roots should we use? Because $\tilde{G}$ is triply transitive, there is no need to try anything other than $x_1=z_1,x_2=z_2,x_3=z_3$. Simply try out the different orderings of $z_4,z_5,z_6$. It turns out that $$ P(z_1,z_2,z_3,z_6,z_5,z_4)=264 $$ an integer to the precision I had available.

At this point I also tested that "complex conjugation" (based on the positions of the conjugate pairs in the list of variables), i.e. the permutation $(12)(36)(45)$ is, indeed, an element of $\tilde{G}$. This added to my confidence :-)


This could still be a false alarm in the sense that the actual value might just happen to be extremely close to $264$. David's suggestion was to look at the polynomial $$ H(T)=\prod_{\sigma\in Sym\{4,5,6\}}(T-P(z_1,z_2,z_3,z_{\sigma(4)},z_{\sigma(5)},z_{\sigma(6)})). $$ This is known to be invariant under $S_6$, and hence absolutely guaranteed to have integer coefficients. The idea is to verify that $H(264)=0$, which we can do with exact integer arithmetic alone. An expansion (still using approximate zeros, but now "legally" allowed to round the coefficients of $H(T)$ to the obvious nearest integer) gives $$ H(T)=T^6-240 T^5-101440 T^4+24410112 T^3+2093608960 T^2-447570968576 T-1492648329216, $$ and we can readily check that $H(264)=0$.

Jyrki Lahtonen
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    I would still prefer to have an independent verification of these calculations. While the expansion of $H(T)$ still gives "near integer" coefficients, limited accurace produced non-zero third decimals already. I need to study the inner workings of Mathematica to see if I can improve the accuracy. Ideally one might want to write the coefficients of $H(T)$ in terms of the elementary symmetric polynomials of the roots, and recalculate using the known values of those. I don't want to do that. Sorry :-) – Jyrki Lahtonen Aug 19 '20 at 19:09
  • I had a go at doing H with my symmetric polynomials script in sagemath but it needs some repair. I will report back if I manage to fix it. –  Aug 19 '20 at 20:25
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    Thanks for doing this! For your future reference, the Mathematica command SymmetricReduction[] makes the sort of elementary symmetric function computations you describe very easy. – David E Speyer Aug 20 '20 at 01:24
2

Verification of the integer $P$:

? r = polroots(X^6+2*X^5+3*X^4+4*X^3+5*X^2+6*X+7)
%27 = [
-1.3078697439524358868574947207136826382 - 0.59329470741458755880701799527984032602*I, 
-1.3078697439524358868574947207136826382 + 0.59329470741458755880701799527984032602*I, 
0.71037886931271562450142054081955002103 - 1.1068452983838490198383021953838865547*I, 
0.71037886931271562450142054081955002103 + 1.1068452983838490198383021953838865547*I, 
-0.40250912536027973764392582010586738286 - 1.3416668277593834410394603953456211331*I, 
-0.40250912536027973764392582010586738286 + 1.3416668277593834410394603953456211331*I]~
? x = [r[1],r[2],r[3],r[6],r[4],r[5]]
%28 = [-1.3078697439524358868574947207136826382 - 0.59329470741458755880701799527984032602*I, 
-1.3078697439524358868574947207136826382 + 0.59329470741458755880701799527984032602*I, 
0.71037886931271562450142054081955002103 - 1.1068452983838490198383021953838865547*I, 
-0.40250912536027973764392582010586738286 + 1.3416668277593834410394603953456211331*I, 
0.71037886931271562450142054081955002103 + 1.1068452983838490198383021953838865547*I, 
-0.40250912536027973764392582010586738286 - 1.3416668277593834410394603953456211331*I]
? 4*x[6]^2*x[1]^2*x[2]*x[3] + 4*x[6]*x[1]*x[2]^2*x[3]^2 + 4*x[6]^2*x[1]*x[2]^2*x[4] + 4*x[1]^2*x[2]^2*x[3]*x[4] + 4*x[6]*x[1]^2*x[3]^2*x[4] + 4*x[6]^2*x[2]*x[3]^2*x[4] + 4*x[6]*x[1]^2*x[2]*x[4]^2 + 4*x[6]^2*x[1]*x[3]*x[4]^2 + 4*x[6]*x[2]^2*x[3]*x[4]^2 + 4*x[1]*x[2]*x[3]^2*x[4]^2 + 4*x[6]*x[1]^2*x[2]^2*x[5] + 4*x[6]^2*x[2]^2*x[3]*x[5] + 4*x[6]^2*x[1]*x[3]^2*x[5] + 4*x[1]^2*x[2]*x[3]^2*x[5] + 4*x[6]^2*x[1]^2*x[4]*x[5] + 4*x[2]^2*x[3]^2*x[4]*x[5] + 4*x[6]^2*x[2]*x[4]^2*x[5] + 4*x[1]*x[2]^2*x[4]^2*x[5] + 4*x[1]^2*x[3]*x[4]^2*x[5] + 4*x[6]*x[3]^2*x[4]^2*x[5] + 4*x[6]^2*x[1]*x[2]*x[5]^2 + 4*x[6]*x[1]^2*x[3]*x[5]^2 + 4*x[1]*x[2]^2*x[3]*x[5]^2 + 4*x[6]*x[2]*x[3]^2*x[5]^2 + 4*x[1]^2*x[2]*x[4]*x[5]^2 + 4*x[6]*x[2]^2*x[4]*x[5]^2 + 4*x[6]^2*x[3]*x[4]*x[5]^2 + 4*x[1]*x[3]^2*x[4]*x[5]^2 + 4*x[6]*x[1]*x[4]^2*x[5]^2 + 4*x[2]*x[3]*x[4]^2*x[5]^2
%29 = 264.00000000000000000000000000000000000 + 0.E-37*I
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    Great. I should have divided $P$ by four (its coefficient are all equal to $4$). That might have kept the coefficients of $H$ manageable. – Jyrki Lahtonen Aug 19 '20 at 20:40