In general, not much is known about the arithmetic of K3 surfaces. Once the geometric Picard number, which is the rank of the Néron-Severi group over an algebraic closure of the base field, is high enough, more structure is known and more can be said. However, until recently not a single K3 surface was known to have geometric Picard number one. We give explicit examples of such surfaces over the rational numbers. This solves an old problem that has been attributed to Mumford. The examples we give also contain infinitely many rational points, thereby answering a question of Swinnerton-Dyer and Poonen.

We prove that the Néron-Severi groups of several complex Fermat surfaces are generated by lines. Specifically, we obtain these new results for all degrees up to 100 that are relatively prime to 6. The proof uses reduction modulo a supersingular prime. The techniques are developed in detail. They can be applied to other surfaces and varieties as well.

Abstract. Assuming the Tate conjecture and the computability ofétale cohomology with finite coefficients, we give an algorithm that computes the Néron-Severi group of any smooth projective geometrically integral variety, and also the rank of the group of numerical equivalence classes of codimension p cycles for any p.

A rational triangle is a triangle with rational sides and rational area. A Heron triangle is a triangle with integral sides and integral area. In this article we will show that there exist infinitely many rational parametrizations, in terms of s, of rational triangles with perimeter 2s(s + 1) and area s(s 2 − 1). As a corollary, there exist arbitrarily many Heron triangles with all the same area and the same perimeter. The proof uses an elliptic K3 surface Y . Its Picard number is computed to be 18 after we prove that the Néron-Severi group of Y injects naturally into the Néron-Severi group of the reduction of Y at a prime of good reduction. We also give some constructions of elliptic surfaces and prove that under mild conditions a cubic surface in P 3 can be given the structure of an elliptic surface by cutting it with the family of hyperplanes through a given line L. Some of these constructions were already known, but appear to have lacked proof in the literature until now.

Abstract. We present a new method to show that a principal homogeneous space of the Jacobian of a curve of genus two is nontrivial. The idea is to exhibit a Brauer-Manin obstruction to the existence of rational points on a quotient of this principal homogeneous space. In an explicit example we apply the method to show that a specific curve has infinitely many quadratic twists whose Jacobians have nontrivial Tate-Shafarevich group.