《A proof of Atiyah Conjecture onConfigurations of Four Points inEuclidean Three-Space》.pdf

ISSN n umb ers are prin ted here A Pro of of Atiyahs Conjecture on Congurations of Four Points in Euclidean ThreeSpace Michael Eastwood Paul Norbury Pure Mathematics Departmen t Adelaide University South Australia Email meastwoomathsa delaideedu au and pnorburymathsa de la ide eduau Abstract From any conguration of nitely many p oints in Euclidean threespace Atiyah constructed a determinant and conjectured that it was always nonzero In this article we prove the conjecture for the case of four p oints AMS Classication numb ers Primary M Secondary G Keywords Atiyahs Conjecture Conguration Space Copyrigh t declaration is prin ted here East wo o d and Norbury Consider n distinct p oints in Euclidean threespace Fixing attention on one of these p oints the others give rise to n p oints on its sphere of vision Thinking of this as the Riemann sphere gives a monic p olynomial of degree n having as its zero es the p oints not equal to the p oint chosen to b e We may regard its co ecients as a complex n vector for degree d n its rst n d co ecients are deemed to b e zero Rep eating this exercise for each of the n p oints gives n such vectors and hence an n n matrix In Atiyah conjectured that a matrix constructed in this way cannot b e singular In Atiyah and Sutclie amass a great deal of numerical evidence for this conjecture and formulate a series of further conjectures based on the geometry that their numerical studies apparently reveal In spite of overwhelming evidence in its favour the basic conjecture as stated ab ove remains surprisingly resistant T