Computation of low weight Siegel modular forms - MathOverflow most recent 30 from http://mathoverflow.net 2013-05-20T04:52:11Z http://mathoverflow.net/feeds/question/22949 http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/rdf http://mathoverflow.net/questions/22949/computation-of-low-weight-siegel-modular-forms Computation of low weight Siegel modular forms Kevin Buzzard 2010-04-29T06:46:38Z 2010-04-29T19:16:48Z <p>We have these huge tables of elliptic curves, which were generated by computing modular forms of weight 2 and level Gamma_0(N) as N increased.</p> <p>For abelian surfaces over $\mathbf{Q}$ we have very little as far as I know. The Langlands philosophy suggests that every abelian surface should be attached to a Siegel modular form of weight (2,2) on $GSp_4$, but the problem is that this weight is not cohomological, which has the concrete consequence that it's going to be tough to compute such things using group cohomology. In particular one of the reasons that modular symbols work for computing elliptic curves, fails in this situation. </p> <p>I guess though that one might be able to somehow use the trace formula to compute the trace of various Hecke operators on Siegel modular forms of weight (2,2) and various levels, because presumably the trace formula translates the problem into some sort of "class group" (in some general sense) computation, plus some combinatorics.</p> <p>[EDIT: from FC's comment, it seems that my guess is wrong.]</p> <p>Has anyone ever implemented this and tabulated the results?</p> <p>[NB I know that people have done computations for low level and high weight, for example there's a lovely paper of Skoruppa that outlines how to compute in level 1; my question is specifically about the weights that are tough to access]</p>