Effective Chabauty for Symmetric Powers of Curves

Faltings' theorem states that curves of genus g > 2 have finitely many rational points. Using the ideas of Faltings, Mumford, Parshin and Raynaud, one obtains an upper bound on the upper bound on the number of rational points [Szp85], XI, §2, but this bound is too large to be used in any reasonable sense. In 1985, Coleman showed [Col85] that Chabauty's method, which works when the Mordell-Weil rank of the Jacobian of the curve is smaller than g, can be used to give a good effective bound on the number of rational points of curves of genus g > 1. We draw ideas from nonarchimedean geometry to show that we can also give an effective bound on the number of rational points outside of the special set of Symd X, where X is a curve of genus g > d, when the Mordell-Weil rank of the Jacobian of the curve is at most g d. Thesis Supervisor: Bjorn Poonen Title: Professor