ABC conjecture

In mathematics, the ABC conjecture relates the prime factors of two integers to those of their sum. It was proposed by David Masser and Joseph Oesterlé in 1985. It is connected with other problems of number theory: for example, the truth of the ABC conjecture would provide a new proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.

Statement

Define the radical of an integer to be the product of its distinct prime factors

$r(n)=\prod _{p|n}p\ .$

Suppose now that the equation $A+B+C=0$ holds for coprime integers $A,B,C$. The conjecture asserts that for every $\epsilon >0$ there exists $\kappa (\epsilon )>0$ such that

$|A|,|B|,|C|<\kappa (\epsilon )r(ABC)^{1+\epsilon }\ .$

A weaker form of the conjecture states that

$(|A|\cdot |B|\cdot |C|)^{1/3}<\kappa (\epsilon )r(ABC)^{1+\epsilon }\ .$

If we define

$\kappa (\epsilon )=\inf _{A+B+C=0,\ (A,B)=1}{\frac {\max\{|A|,|B|,|C|\}}{N^{1+\epsilon }}}\ ,$

then it is known that $\kappa \rightarrow \infty$ as $\epsilon \rightarrow 0$.

Baker introduced a more refined version of the conjecture in 1998. Assume as before that $A+B+C=0$ holds for coprime integers $A,B,C$. Let $N$ be the radical of $ABC$ and $\omega$ the number of distinct prime factors of $ABC$. Then there is an absolute constant $c$ such that

$|A|,|B|,|C|<c(\epsilon ^{-\omega }N)^{1+\epsilon }\ .$

This form of the conjecture would give very strong bounds in the method of linear forms in logarithms.

Results

It is known that there is an effectively computable $\kappa (\epsilon )$ such that

$|A|,|B|,|C|<\exp \left({\kappa (\epsilon )N^{1/3}(\log N)^{3}}\right)\ .$