Errata for Course Notes - J.S. Milne, Top
This file contains miscellaneous errata and additional remarks for my course notes that I haven't yet incorporated into the versions on the web.
Most are taken from e-mail messages -- I thank everyone who has contributed!

Group Theory
Fields and Galois Theory
Algebraic Geometry
Algebraic Number Theory
Modular Functions and Modular Forms
Elliptic Curves
Abelian Varieties
Lectures on Etale Cohomology
Class Field Theory
Complex Multiplication
Algebraic Groups
Basic Theory of Affine Group Schemes
Lie Algebras, Algebraic Groups, and Lie Groups
Reductive Groups
Algebraic groups, Lie groups, and their arithmetic subgroups

No known errors.

## Fields and Galois Theory v4.50 (FT)

Page 115, the proof of the Luroth's theorem, in -2th para on this page, I think that we should consider the largest degree of one of $a_i$. (Wei Xu)
Page 117, Remark 9.30 still has a problem, every automorphism of $\Omega/F$ extends uniquely to an automorphism of $\Omega^{al}/F$, no problem about that, but it is not to say that every automorphism of $\Omega^{al}/F$ comes from $\Omega/F$. (Wei Xu)

## Algebraic Geometry v6.00 (AG)

p144, bottom paragraph: "to give a regular map from P^n to a variety V is the same as..."
should read "to give a regular map from a variety V to P^n is the same as..." (israel vainsencher).

No known errors.

## Modular Forms and Modular Functions v1.30 (MF)

p.14, proof of 1.2, third paragraph
As Keenan Kidwell and Tony Feng have pointed out, I muddle the proof. I should say: G is a union of the interiors of the sets gV, g in G; fix a countable base; the sets from the countable base contained in the interior of some gV form a countable cover of G; now we only need to take enough g's to get each of the sets in the countable cover at least once.

Keenan Kidwell points out, the sets gV are not open, hence not unions of open subsets. Fortunately this is easily fixed. As he writes:

In the proof of Proposition 1.2 in your exposition of modular forms and modular functions (beginning near the bottom of page 14), is it really possible to assume that the set $V$ is both open and compact? Initially I assumed that, because you referred to V as a neighbourhood of e, you meant that it was a set which contained e in its interior, but later you say that each set gV is a union of open sets in the countable base, which implies that gV is in fact open. For a general LCH group, we have a base of opens around each point consisting of sets with compact closure, but not necessarily open compact sets, right? But I think this is fixed fairly easily, since g is in the interior of gV, we have an open cover G=\bigcup (gV)^{int}, and by second-countability, this has a countable subcover, and so in particular we can write G=\bigcup g_n V for some sequence g_n, and then the proof goes through unchanged. So I think the only issue is when you say that each gV is a union of open sets.

Tony Feng points out:
In the third paragraph of the proof of Proposition 1.2, I was thinking that not every open set in the countable base need be contained in a single gV, but of course we can throw away such open sets from the base.
p.15, lemma 1.3 From Tony Feng:
In the proof of Lemma 1.3, I am not sure why V_1 \cap U_1 would be compact. I agree that it is relatively compact/closed, which is enough to get the desired U_2.

From Tony Feng: I think I've identified a small typo in your modular forms notes that was tripping me up for a while.
On page 65, in the right hand side for the inner product I think the exp(-2 \pi i n z/h) in the integrand should be \exp(2\pi i n (-x+iy)/h), or something equivalent: it's the complex conjugate of exp(2\pi i n z/h), but z is complex!

## Abelian Varieties v2.00 (AV)

This draft is still very rough. Some proofs have been fixed in the corrected version of my 1986 article on Abelian Varieties (xnotes).

p2. The claim in the footnote that every abelian surface is a Jacobian variety is not quite true. See the preprints of E. Kani, "The moduli spaces of Jacobians isomorphic to a product of two elliptic curves" and "The existence of Jacobians isomorphic to a product of two elliptic curves". (Kuang-yen Shih)

p26. now shows that dim(H^1(A,IF_l)) >= 2g: ')' missing (Timo Keller).

p37, line 6. The regular map alpha should go from T to the dual of A (Bart Litjens).

From Bhupendra Nath Tiwari: For AV, CFT, and CM

From Tobias Barthel See pdf file (2 pages)

From Shaul Zemel In the proof of Theorem 10.15, p49, concerning the map from Hom(A,B) \tensor Z_l to the module Hom(T_l A,T_l B) (over Z_l), you start by proving that if e_1,...,e_n are linearly independent over Z in Hom(A,B) then their images are linearly independent over Z_l in Hom(T_l A,T_l B). But this immediately proves that n cannot exceed the rank of the latter over Z_l, i.e., 4dimAdimB (as can be even more clearly seen in Hom(V_l A,V_l B) over Q_l, after tensoring the latter with Q_l). Hence you immediately obtain the finiteness of the rank of Hom(A,B), and the desired bound, without the need to involve decomposition into simple Abelian varieties, different topologies, and polynomials. This is in fact similar (as you have indicated there for something else) to the fact that showing that if a (clearly torsion-free) subgroup of a real vector space of dimension n is discrete then it's free of rank not exceeding n.

Timo Keller points out that, in the proof of Theorem 10.15, p49, M should be defined to be a Z-submodule of End^0(A), not End(T_l(A)) (the degree map P is defined on End^0(A), not on End(T_l(A)). Also, when I write "Now choose the e_i to be a Q-basis for End^0(A)." I seem to be assuming that End^0(A) is finite dimensional over Q, which is what I'm trying to prove. The proof should be replaced by this.

From Everett Howe In Prop. 13.2(b), I found a small typo, probably carried over from copying the result from [1986b] and not changing all of the notation: the "f" in the exponent should be an alpha.

Tim Dokchitser points out that I prove Zarhin's trick (13.12) only over an algebraically closed field , and then immediately apply it in (13.13) over a finite field. This is doubly confusing because (13.10) is certainly false over nonalgebraically closed field (over such a field an abelian variety need not be isogenous to a principally polarized abelian variety).
However, I believe everything is O.K. Specifically, the proof of Zarhin's trick requires only (13.8), and, because this holds over an algebraically closed field, it holds over every perfect field (see my 1986 Storr's article Abelian Varieties 16.11 and 16.14).

From Sunil Chetty. Near the start of I 14 (Rosati involution): in (\alpha\beta)^\dagger = \beta\alpha there should be a dagger on each of \beta and \alpha.

p.154, IV. Theorem 7.3. The property in (a) of the statement only holds for the points P outside a closed subset of codimension 1. As Martin Orr writes:

[The theorem] asserts that the Siegel moduli variety M_{g,d} over the complex numbers satisfies: for every point P in M_{g,d}, there is an open neighbourhood U of P and a family A of polarized abelian varieties over U such that the fibre A_Q represents j^{-1}(Q) for all Q in M_{g,d} (I assume this should say "all Q in U" at the end).
I don't see how such a neighbourhood can exist around the elliptic point 0 in the j-line, because of the standard monodromy argument that there is no family of elliptic curves on all of M_{1,1}. Specifically, if we had such a U then the period mapping (which is just the inclusion U -> M_{1,1}) would lift to a map from U' to the upper half plane H, for some open neighbourhood U' of 0 (wlog lifting 0 to i). Then the image of this lifting contains an open neighbourhood V of i in H, and the map H -> M_{1,1} is not injective on V.

From Roy Smith (on proofs of Torelli's theorem III 13)
You ask on your website for advice on conceptual proofs of Torelli. ... here goes.
There are many, and the one you give there is the least conceptual one, due I believe to Martens.
Of course you also wanted short, ....well maybe these are not all so short.
The one due to Weil is based on the fact that certain self intersections of a jacobian theta divisor are reducible, and is sketched in mumford's lectures on curves given at michigan. Indeed about 4 proofs are sketched there.
The most geometric one, due to Andreotti - Mayer and Green is to intersect at the origin of the jacobian, those quadric hypersurfaces occurring as tangent cones to the theta divisor at double points, thus recovering the canonical model of the curve as their base locus, with some few exceptions.
To show this works, one can appeal to the deformation theoretic results of Kempf. i.e. since the italians proved that a canonical curve is cut out by quadrics most of the time, one needs to know that the ideal of all quadrics containing the canonical curve is generated by the ones coming as tangent cones to theta. the ones which do arise that way cut out the directions in moduli of abelian varieties where theta remains singular in codimension three.
But these equisingular deformations of theta embed into the deformations of the resolution of theta by the symmetric product of the curve, which kempf showed are equal to the deformations of the curve itself. hence every equisingular deformation of theta(C) comes from a deformation of C, and these are cut out by the equations in moduli of abelian varieties defined by quadratic hypersurfaces containing C. hence the tangent cones to theta determine C.
This version of Green's result is in a paper of smith and varley, in compositio 1990.
Perhaps the shortest geometric proof is due to andreotti, who computed the branch locus of the canonical map on the theta divisor, and showed quite directly it equals the dual variety of the canonical curve. this is explained in andreotti's paper from about 1958, and quite nicely too, with some small errata, in arbarello, cornalba, griffiths, and harris' book on geometry of curves.
There are other short proofs that torelli holds for general curves, simply from the fact that the quadrics containing the canonical curve occur as the kernel of the dual of the derivative of the torelli map from moduli of curves to moduli of abelian varieties. this is described in the article on prym torelli by smith and varley in contemporary mat. vol. 312, in honor of c.h. clemens, 2002, AMS. there is also a special argument there for genus 4, essentially using zariski's main theorem on the map from moduli of curves to moduli of jacobians.
There are also inductive arguments, based on the fact that the boundary of moduli of curves of genus g contains singular curves of genus g-1, and allowing one to use lower genus torelli results to deduce degree torelli for later genera.
Then of course there is matsusaka's proof, derived from torelli's original proof that given an isomorphism of polarized jacobians, the theta divisor defines the graph of an isomorphism between their curves.
For shortest most conceptual, I recommend the proof in Arbarello, Cornalba, Griffiths Harris, i.e. Andreotti's, for conceptualness and completeness in a reasonably short argument..

## Lectures on Etale Cohomology v2.21 (LEC)

From Section 9 on, I often abbreviate H^i(X_{et},F) to H^i(X,F) (Hongbo Yin).

## Class Field Theory v4.02 (CFT)

p.2, l7, Replace X^2+m with X^2-m (Jack Petok). p.154. Theorem 3.6 (Existence theorem). The theorem should say that there exists an L/K unramified at the primes not dividing m etc., otherwise the statement doesn't really make sense. (Li Jianing)

No known errors.

## Algebraic Groups v1.00 (iAG)

19.56 is misstated: It should say that every split reductive group... T is a split torus.

## Basic Theory of Affine Group Schemes v1.00 (AGS)

p.30. The definition of a sub-coalgebra doesn't make sense unless, e.g., k is a field, because in general D\otimes D is not a submodule of C\otimes C. (Roland Loetscher).

p.261. For an improved exposition of the proof of Theorem 5.1, see RG I, 1.29.

p.259. There is a problem is with my definition of "almost-simple". Certainly "almost-simple" should imply "semisimple", so we should define an almost-simple algebraic group to be a noncommutative smooth connected algebraic group that is semisimple (so its radical over the algebraic closure is trivial) and has no nontrivial proper smooth connected normal algebraic subgroup. The quotient of such a group by its centre should be called simple. (The centre of a reductive group is the kernel of the adjoint representation on the Lie algebra. It suffices to check this over an algebraically closed field, see RG 2.12).

If we don't require that G be semisimple, then we get to the land of pseudo-reductive groups (Conrad-Gabber-Prasad), which is very complicated. Tits defines a pseudo-simple algebraic group to be a noncommutative smooth connected affine algebraic group with no nontrivial proper smooth connected normal subgroup. (Sebastian Petersen)

From Bhupendra Nath Tiwari: list of misprints for AGS, LAG, RG odt; doc

## Lie Algebras, Algebraic Groups, and Lie Groups, v2.00 (LAG)

p.15. In the final paragraph before "The isomorphism theorems", it states that if a is a characteristic ideal of g, then every ideal in a is also an ideal in g. It should read: If a is an ideal in g, then every characteristic ideal in a is also an ideal in g (which is characteristic if a is characteristic).

From David Calderbank
Page 52, Weyl's Theorem 5.20. Part (a) states "If ad is semisimple, then g is semisimple". However, semisimplicity of the adjoint representation is characteristic of reductive Lie algebras (Proposition 6.2), not just semisimple ones. The proof uses more than semisimplicity of the adjoint representation.

Page 56, Proposition 5.29. In the non-algebraically closed case, I don't think it is necessarily true that a Lie algebra with all elements semisimple is commutative. Indeed, so(3) over R would be a counterexample.

Page 57, Proposition 6.4. I don't see how the proof establishes the implication "g has a faithful semisimple representation => g is reductive".

## Reductive Groups, v1.00 (RG)

p.14, following the statement of 1.29: The centre (and radical) of GL_n consists of the scalar matrices, not the diagonal matrices. (Justin Campbell)

From Timo Keller
p. 21: ... with [A,B] = AB - BA,and <- space missing
p. 25, l.-3: ) missing at the end of the equation

## Algebraic groups, Lie groups, and their arithmetic groups v3.00 (ALA)

p. 340 footnote 4. From Brian Conrad: you point out that a root datum is really an ordered 6-tuple, not an ordered 4-tuple. In case it may be of interest, the last bit of information in the 6-tuple (the bijective map a |---> a^{\vee} from roots to coroots) is uniquely determined by everything else, due to the requirements in the axioms of a root datum -- see Lemma 3.2.4 in the book "Pseudo-reductive groups".

I, Theorem 16.21. The centre of a reductive group is of multiplicative type, but need not be reduced (e.g., SL_p). The correct statement is that the radical of G (which is a torus) is the reduced connected group attached to the centre. (There may be other errors of this type, where I incorrectly translated from the characteristic zero case to the general case.) There will be a new version of the notes probably in March 2012.

p. 372 footnote 16. Chapter II?? should be Chapter III.
p. 172, l.1: "and so is split be a finite" should be "and so is split by a finite" (Timo Keller).