Quatrième partie · À la poursuite des suturesChapitre 16
Une loi de réciprocité
A reciprocity law
en chantierRead from the draft of 3 October 2026
When a theory singles out one identification between two incarnations of an object, does that identification come from the group’s arithmetic source, and is every twist it picks up around a loop a Galois symmetry?
For a rigid object there is nothing to choose: between any two of its incarnations there is exactly one seam. For each of the nine objects of the group of order 168 that have automorphisms there are seams between any two incarnations, and a theory may single some out by its own structure: inversion on the class , the transvection of a vector of , the tangent at a flex of Klein’s quartic. Carried around a loop, such natural seams can return a nontrivial automorphism. On the twenty-four flexes, the tangent and the residual point compose to an automorphism of order 3.
The program’s first central conjecture says where natural seams come from. Take a group with an arithmetic source, as the group of order 168 has Klein’s lattice over the integers of . Every identification made naturally inside any of its geometries should come from the source; going around any loop, the only twists picked up should be Galois symmetries of the source’s field; and where no natural identification exists, a Galois symmetry should exchange the candidates. If it holds, three layers that the book treats apart, monodromy, double lives and completions, become one statement, in the way Artin’s reciprocity law contains the older ones, and a choice is unavoidable exactly where Galois acts on it.
For 168 the pieces are held separately. The type law says what a Galois twist does at each prime. Klein’s lattice carries all fifteen objects as its own data and induces every seam for thirteen of them. The two exceptions, the objects of sizes 84 and 168, are where the Galois involution limits what a natural construction can do. The draft now makes “natural” exact, proves the second and third parts for every source, and finds that the first, read as completeness, fails in both directions.
Let a finite group have an arithmetic source: a lattice over the integers of a number field whose residues at the primes and whose points at the complex place carry the geometries of . Then:
(i) every identification that a geometry of makes naturally between two incarnations of an object comes from ;
(ii) going around any loop of natural identifications, the only twists picked up are Galois symmetries of the source’s field;
(iii) where no natural identification exists, it is because a Galois symmetry exchanges the candidates.
For the source is Klein’s lattice over , , with its group of isometries , .
Status
Conjectured, and stated so far only in words. For the group of order 168 every piece below is a theorem of the draft or an exhaustive computation in exact arithmetic: seam monodromy as non-abelian cohomology, the type law and its six global lattices, the fifteen objects as data of Klein’s lattice, the seams the lattice induces, the bound that the Galois involution puts on natural automorphisms, and the Galois action on Klein’s quartic. There “natural” has a working definition, an automorphism that commutes with and with the antilinear isometries of the lattice; the general statement must say what replaces it, and which fields count as the source’s: the twist is a Galois symmetry of over , a field of roots of unity over the source’s.
The general check is now in the draft. With a seam called natural when it commutes with every linear and Galois-semilinear symmetry of the source, the second and third parts hold for every source, proved: natural seams between two incarnations exist exactly when their forms, classes in a non-abelian cohomology set, agree; they then form a torsor under the natural automorphisms; and the twisted part of every loop is a twist of the type law. For 168, around loops of natural seams through 2, and 7 the holonomies are exactly the natural automorphisms, computed. The first part, read as completeness, natural if and only if induced, fails in both directions, with each failure explained. The ingredients are classical; whether the statement about the whole network is new needs a search of the literature before anyone calls it so.
Sutures naturelles et monodromieNatural seams and monodromy
A seam system is a family of incarnations of one object with a set of seams between them, and its monodromy around a cycle is the composite of the seams, an automorphism of the incarnation it starts from. On the object of size 24, whose automorphism group is , theories supply seams by their own conventions: inversion , the transvection , the rotation by which a flex’s stabilizer turns its tangent line, the Singer collineation of a cyclic labelling. Where these meet, they agree.
One theory can also supply two seams between the same pair of incarnations. A flex of Klein’s quartic goes to its tangent line, and a flex tangent goes to the one other point where it meets the curve, again a flex. Their composite , a flex to the other flex on its tangent, has order 3: , , . The power of an automorphism, the exponent with which it acts on a conjugacy class through any seam, makes it comparable across theories: under every seam, is Hall’s multiplier 2 on the cyclic labellings of the Fano plane and the fourth-power map on .
The composite of the tangent seam and the residual-point seam is an automorphism of the flexes of power 4. So the cycle flexes flex tangents flexes along these two natural seams has monodromy of order 3, and turns each flex triangle cyclically. Under every seam between the flexes and the cyclic labellings, corresponds to Hall’s multiplier 2, and both correspond to the fourth-power map on and .
The rotation seam sends the flex to , which turns its tangent by , and the flex to , since acts there by . As , the rotation seam carries to a map sending to , which is the fourth-power map, and an automorphism of this object is fixed by its power. The agreement with Hall’s multiplier was computed through the natural seams.
La monodromie comme cohomologieMonodromy as cohomology
A choice of alignments, one for each vertex of a graph of incarnations, turns a seam system into link variables , and another choice changes them by : a seam system is a lattice gauge connection, its monodromy the holonomy, and it is coherent exactly when it is gauge-equivalent to the trivial one. This is the classical dictionary between local systems on a graph and representations of its fundamental group, with the gauge group supplied by the stabilizer principle. An example: over the twenty-eight pairs of points of the sky, the book’s family of algebras is carried from one pair to a pair sharing a point by the element of order 7 fixing that point. Around each triangle of pairs through one point the transports close up; around the triangle they return , which exchanges and 0.
Allowing seams over automorphisms, changes of marking, enlarges the gauge group to , an extension of by . The question whether an object’s twisted seams can be chosen consistently is then whether this extension splits. For the group of order 168 it does for all fifteen objects, so every object whose class fixes is the restriction of a -set. The non-neutral cases appear only at the double cover, on its objects of sizes 112 and 336. This is the monodromy layer that a reciprocity law would have to contain.
Let be a connected graph with fundamental group , and an object with stabilizer and automorphism group . The gauge classes of seam systems for over correspond to , and to the principal -coverings of whose fibre over a vertex is the set of alignments there. The system is coherent exactly when its class is trivial. With seams over automorphisms, the classes are .
Choose a spanning tree and the gauge in which the link variables are 1 on its edges; the others are the images of the free generators of , and the remaining freedom is one element of acting by conjugation. A principal -covering of a connected graph is determined by its holonomy, and in a gauge the transition maps of the covering by alignments are the link variables. The argument uses only that link variables compose in a group, so it holds with in place of .
La source arithmétique : le réseau de KleinThe arithmetic source: Klein’s lattice
Let with integers , , so that splits and ramifies. Up to scaling and an automorphism of there is one hermitian -lattice of rank 3 with a faithful action of , and one member of the family is unimodular: Klein’s lattice , with the form . Its isometries are , 336 of them, with carrying the character of Klein’s representation. In Elkies’ model it is spanned by , and with the form , and its theta series begins .
The lattice carries the group’s two lives and the plane Klein found it in, at one vertex. Reduced modulo and it gives the Fano plane, the link of a vertex of the building at 2; reduced modulo it gives a conic of eight points, the sky, the link of a vertex of the tree at 7; and over it is Klein’s plane. A vector of norm 2 or 3 is read at all three places at once.
The vectors of norm 2 of form 21 pairs , and those of norm 3 form 28. (1) In Klein’s plane, for of norm 2 runs through the 21 involutions of , and for of norm 3 through the 28 bitangents of the quartic. (2) At 2, carries the pairs of norm 2 onto the 21 flags of the Fano plane and those of norm 3 onto its 28 antiflags. (3) At 7, reduction carries them onto the 21 points inside the conic and the 28 outside it, hence onto the 28 pairs of points of the sky. These maps commute with , so the bitangents, the antiflags and the pairs of points of the sky are three reductions of one set of pairs of vectors, joined by the seams of the object of size 28.
(1) Unimodularity makes integral, so preserves the lattice; it fixes and is on , and distinct pairs give distinct centres. The invariant quartic forms make one line over , and on each of the 28 lines the quartic restricts to a square. (2) The pairing modulo between and is well defined and perfect; the point lies on the line exactly when is even. (3) A point off the conic lies on no tangent or on two; there are 21 of the first kind and 28 of the second. Maps between incarnations of a rigid object that commute with the group are its seams.
La loi des typesThe type law
What a Galois twist does to a residue depends on how the prime decomposes. For a -lattice over the integers of a Galois field with character , a twisted Galois symmetry is a pair of a Galois element and an automorphism of with . The type law says that then carries the residue at one prime to the Galois transport of the residue at another, and the decomposition and inertia groups sort the result into three types: a seam between two residues, a semilinear map of one residue, a linear map that is not inner.
For Klein’s lattice, with complex conjugation and the outer automorphism: at , exchanges the two primes, the two Fano planes are dual, and is a polarity, a seam from points to lines; at 3, inert, lies in and is the Frobenius of ; at 7, ramified, is an isometry of the conic form that permutes the eight points of the sky oddly, an element of outside . The same reading explains the pattern of the double lives: for and the outer automorphism that exchanges a dual pair in one life and is a non-square Möbius map in the other is complex conjugation of the character field, the prime of the dual life splitting and the prime of the Möbius life ramifying.
Let be a -lattice over with good reduction at , residue , and a twisted Galois symmetry. Then has good reduction at and . In particular: if there is a -semilinear seam over from the residue at to the residue at (split type); if , is realized on by a -semilinear map (inert type); if , by a linear map normalizing the image of , not in when is perfect and is outer (ramified type). If moreover , then carries every residue of good reduction to its dual.
The conjugate lattice has character and residue at ; the lattice with acting as has character and residue there. The characters are equal, so the two are lattices in one representation over , and by Brauer and Nesbitt their reductions have the same composition factors; the first is absolutely irreducible, hence so is the second, and they are isomorphic. Read through a basis, this is the semilinear seam, and when fixes it is a semilinear map of one residue, linear when acts trivially on the residue field. If the linear map were a scalar times , then would be a homomorphism of the perfect group into its centre, hence trivial, and inner.
La table depuis un seul réseauThe table from one lattice
Every object of the group of order 168 is a native datum of Klein’s lattice, an orbit of on data built from and : the vectors of norm 5 (168, trivial stabilizer), their pairs (84), the vectors of norm 3 (56), the roots (42), the ordered pairs of root pairs in an -frame or a -frame (42 each), the pairs of norm 3 (28), the cyclotomic structures with (24), the root pairs (21), the - and -tetrahedra (14 each), the eight Mumford sublattices, the - and -frames (7 each), and itself. A frame is three mutually orthogonal root pairs, an -frame one whose roots share a residue modulo ; a tetrahedron is four vectors of norm 3 with pairwise inner product .
Each place reads the data with a kernel of its own. At 2, where , a vector datum loses its sign; at 7 every native datum is read faithfully except those of norm 5; at the projective residue forgets scalars. The Fano plane of Part I is the reduction at , the prime of that does not contain the character value of , so its labelling is the arithmetic one.
Each of the fifteen data above is a single -orbit whose stabilizers form the class of its object. Moreover each root pair is orthogonal to exactly four others, the frames are exactly fourteen, seven -frames and seven -frames; the tetrahedra are exactly twenty-eight and each sums to 0; the cyclotomic structures are exactly the 24 elements of trace ; and the eight Mumford sublattices are the eight neighbours of in the tree at 7.
Treize objets sur quinzeThirteen objects of fifteen
Call an automorphism of an incarnation built from the lattice natural if it commutes with and, when the incarnation is stable under the antilinear isometries, with them too; a seam is induced by the lattice if it is a composite of residue maps that forget nothing, their inverses, natural automorphisms, and the actions of the Galois groups of fields of roots of unity over on residues over them. For the six rigid objects every seam is induced. For seven more the natural automorphisms realize the whole group : on the vectors of norm 3, on the roots and on the tetrahedra; on the cyclotomic structures, where it is the twist of the flexes; the exchange and rotation of the root pairs of a frame on the ordered frame pairs.
So for thirteen of the fifteen objects the lattice produces every seam: once one seam from the native datum to an incarnation is induced, all are. The two that fail are the object of size 84, with stabilizer , and the regular object of size 168.
Every incarnation in the book’s seam tables, and each of the five incarnations of the object of size 28, is a -set of data of the lattice at one place. For the six rigid objects every seam is induced. For , , , , , and the natural automorphisms realize all of , so all seams are induced once one is. For at most two of the four seams between two incarnations stable under the antilinear isometries are induced, and they differ by the involution of quotient class . For the regular object, the natural automorphisms of such an incarnation form a group of order at most 6; on the vectors of norm 5 they are .
A rigid object has one seam between any two incarnations, and the residue maps named are seams. For and , commutes with and with every antilinear isometry and moves a vector of norm 2 or 3 within its orbit, so it is the nontrivial automorphism; for the automorphisms are the powers of ; the frame operations are defined by orthogonality alone and generate . The two exceptions follow from the next theorem, with the instances computed.
Les deux rangées exceptionnellesThe two exceptional rows
Conjugation by an antilinear isometry acts on the automorphisms of any incarnation stable under it, and the natural automorphisms are its fixed points. On the object of size 84 the automorphism group is , its three involutions named by the three subgroups of order 4 of through the centre: , and . The Galois involution fixes the class and exchanges with , so only the first involution is natural, and no natural construction picks out either of the other two.
With natural seams made exact (Formes et sutures naturelles, below), both rows read the same way. They are the rows on which the arithmetic symmetries act nontrivially on , so even between incarnations of one form only some seams are natural: two of four for the object of size 84, six of 168 for the regular object, or two for its vector form. That is a residual symmetry, a torsor of natural seams that is never a point, and not an obstruction: each row has one projective form, so natural seams always exist. Choosing a prime above 2, the same as fixing the labels and , leaves on the 84 only , which acts trivially on pairs, and all four seams become natural. On the regular object, even without the Galois involution, the automorphisms of the vectors of norm 5 that commute with form a dihedral group of order 8, not all 168; getting all of them would need a base point, which no natural construction supplies.
The objects and are the rows on which the arithmetic symmetry group acts nontrivially on , so that even between incarnations of one form only some seams are natural: two of four for , six (projective) or two (vector) of 168 for . Their exception is a residual symmetry, a torsor that is never a point, not a cohomological obstruction: has one projective form and one projective form. The obstruction does occur, at the rows and , which the lattice counts as induced because induction allows auxiliary choices: points of contact and eigenvectors for have the dihedral form, ordered pairs, imaginary points and the classes , the cyclic one.
The Galois involution fixes the involution of quotient class and exchanges those of classes and , so it bounds the natural automorphisms; this is the earlier bound for the group generated by and one antilinear isometry, an instance of the natural-automorphism theorem. The forms were found by enumerating the complements and their fixed groups.
Galois sur la quartique de KleinGalois on Klein’s quartic
Klein’s representation is defined over , , and maps the matrices onto themselves with , the conjugation by . So is inner exactly when is a square modulo 7, and complex conjugation is the outer automorphism. Acting coordinatewise on the flexes, bitangents, centres and flex triangles of the quartic, each is a seam over ; through the unique seams to the projective line it is itself.
The automorphism groups of objects are realized by Galois groups of fields of definition: exchanges the two points of contact of each bitangent, acts on the eigenvectors of the elements of order 4 by inversion, and , corrected by its twisting element, is . The six objects whose class the outer automorphism moves have no incarnation among the points, lines and conics of the plane that is defined over as a set; their incarnations come in pairs exchanged by the conjugation of . The bridge between the points and the lines of the Fano plane, refuted for a fixed marking, is built over the outer automorphism by Galois conjugation.
Let be an incarnation of an object among the points, lines or conics of the plane of the quartic. If some with maps onto itself, then the stabilizer class of is fixed by . Hence the objects with stabilizers , , , , , have no incarnation there defined over as a set.
restricts to some with a non-square, so it is a seam over the outer automorphism from to , and a seam over from to itself exists only if .
Formes et sutures naturellesForms and natural seams
Make “natural” exact. The arithmetic symmetry group of a source is the group of its linear and Galois-semilinear isometries that normalize ; for Klein’s lattice it is , of order 672, with complex conjugation of . A seam between two incarnations built from the source is natural when it commutes with every element of that preserves both: a natural transformation, in the sense of category theory, for the symmetries of the source. A seam that uses an auxiliary choice, a primitive root of unity, a square class modulo 7, a prime of an extension field, commutes only with the stabilizer of that choice, and that stabilizer is its naturality group.
An incarnation that preserves is a set with an action of , not only of , and its class as such, its form, is a class in a non-abelian cohomology set. Natural seams join incarnations of one form and none of two different forms. For 168 the objects of sizes 56 and 42 with cyclic stabilizers each have two projective forms: a cyclic one, where the Galois element fixing a point centralizes its stabilizer, as on the classes and and the fixed points of tori, and a dihedral one, where it inverts it, as on the points of contact of the bitangents and the eigenvectors of Klein’s quartic, since complex conjugation inverts eigenvalues. So the obstruction to natural seams sits there. The objects of sizes 84 and 168 have one form each, and their natural seams always exist but are never unique: 2 of the 4 seams, and 6 of the 168. In the strict sense they are residual symmetry, not obstruction. Around loops of natural seams through 2, and 7 the holonomies are exactly the natural automorphisms, and the twisted part of every loop is the Galois class: a polarity at 2, complex conjugation at , an odd Möbius map at 7.
Let be a group of arithmetic symmetries with , preserving the class and an incarnation , and let be the stabilizer in of a point with -stabilizer . The -sets that are transitive -sets of class correspond to the classes of complements of in , the pointed set : the forms. A natural seam exists if and only if and have the same form; the natural seams then form a torsor under , the natural automorphisms; and a canonical seam exists exactly when the forms agree and that group is trivial. Forms exist if and only if the extension of by splits.
A natural seam is an isomorphism of -sets, which exists exactly when the -stabilizers are conjugate: the stabilizer principle for . A point with -stabilizer has an -stabilizer meeting in and mapping onto , a complement, determined up to -conjugacy, and complements of a normal subgroup in a split extension are classified by non-abelian . The fixed points of on the torsor of seams form a torsor under the fixed group.
Ce qui manqueWhat is missing
The first part of the conjecture, read as completeness, fails in both directions. A seam built only from residue maps of data the arithmetic symmetries preserve, at the places of , from Galois transports and from natural automorphisms is natural by construction. But the broader induction the lattice uses, which allows reductions at primes of extension fields and choices of square classes, reaches seams that are not natural: the reading of a vector of norm 3 by its ordered secant of the sky is natural only for a subgroup of index two not containing , and the reduction at the prime of over the Bianchi prime only for the linear symmetries; each joins incarnations of different forms and is natural for the stabilizer of the convention it uses. Natural seams need not be induced by any finite construction: the -stable regular orbits of Klein’s plane form a continuum, any two joined by six natural seams, and the orbit of receives six natural seams from the pairs of norm 7 with no construction from the source known to reach it. A statement that every natural seam is induced can hold only for a notion of induced seam that contains the stabilizer principle for the arithmetic symmetries themselves, and then it says nothing. The second and third parts, in the strict sense, hold.
Beyond 168 the same definitions find phenomena 168 lacks. For with the icosians, the object of size 12 has no incarnation stable under all the arithmetic symmetries, although its class is fixed by the outer automorphism: every incarnation has a Galois twin. For the unipotent object has such a form exactly when . And the object of size 15 of has canonical natural seams without being rigid: between the axes of the pure unit icosians, the pairs of points of , the pairs of disjoint pairs of five letters and the involutions, exactly one of the three seams is natural, and these commute; no object of 168 does this. The type law also has a known edge: a life is seen only if its module is a residue of a lattice, and in dimension at most 4 that forces the group into Klein’s and Blichfeldt’s lists, so a reciprocity law must say what natural seams do on the lives that are no residue. Next: the double cover, whose objects carry gerbes that do not split; the law modulo 4 for ; and a closed notion of induced seam with a corrected statement of the first part.
What corrected form of the first part holds: for which closed notion of induced seam, short of the stabilizer principle for the arithmetic symmetries themselves, are the natural seams of a source induced? Do the gerbes of the double cover, which do not split, obstruct natural incarnations of its new objects, as the object of size 12 of is obstructed?
In the strict sense the second and third parts are now theorems for every source, and the first, as completeness, is false as stated. What remains of the first part is a corrected statement, for a closed notion of induced seam short of the stabilizer principle itself, checked on 168 and on the other lattices of the type law: the icosians for , Valentiner’s lattice for , the Witting lattice for , where the group of arithmetic symmetries modulo is already non-abelian, and the double cover with its Weil lattice.
The next chapter is the one established piece of the network: what counting cannot hear and what finite sets cannot say are measured by the same Galois orbits. The product formula of Chapter 19 asks for the group’s order the question this chapter asks of its seams, and the epilogue’s question, whether every coherent symmetry of the network of all curves is arithmetic, is this one without the finite group.