Digital Commons Network^™

Counting Rational Points, Integral Points, Fields, And Hypersurfaces, Joseph Gunther

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis comes in four parts, which can be read independently of each other.

In the first chapter, we prove a generalization of Poonen's finite field Bertini theorem, and use this to show that the obvious obstruction to embedding a curve in some smooth surface is the only obstruction over perfect fields, extending a result of Altman and Kleiman. We also prove a conjecture of Vakil and Wood on the asymptotic probability of hypersurface sections having a prescribed number of singularities.

In the second chapter, for a fixed base curve over a finite field of characteristic at least 5, we …