Consequences
Faltings' 1983 paper had as consequences a number of statements which had previously been conjectured:
- The Mordell conjecture that a curve of genus greater than 1 over a number field has only finitely many rational points;
- The Shafarevich conjecture that there are only finitely many isomorphism classes of abelian varieties of fixed dimension and fixed polarization degree over a fixed number field with good reduction outside a given finite set of places; and
- The Isogeny theorem that abelian varieties with isomorphic Tate modules (as Ql-modules with Galois action) are isogenous.
The reduction of the Mordell conjecture to the Shafarevich conjecture was due to Parshin (1971). A sample application of Faltings' theorem is to a weak form of Fermat's Last Theorem: for any fixed n > 4 there are at most finitely many primitive integer solutions to an + bn = cn, since for such n the curve xn + yn = 1 has genus greater than 1.
Read more about this topic: Faltings' Theorem
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