Problem #19
Hilbert's Tenth Problem over Q
Is the following problem decidable? Given a polynomial , determine whether has a rational root, i.e. a tuple such that .
Known Partial Results
Hilbert's 10th problem was to find a procedure which, given any polynomial , would decide if has an integral root, i.e. a tuple such that . However, the MRDP (Matiyasevich, Robinson, Davis, and Putnam) Theorem states that there is no such computable procedure.
Given any countable ring with a computable presentation, one can ask a version of Hilbert's 10th problem over . Namely, is the following problem decidable: given a polynomial , determine whether has a root in ? The answer to this question is known for several rings and open for others:
- For , the algebraic closure of the rationals, the answer is yes, i.e. the problem is decidable. This follows from quantifier elimination for algebraically closed fields.
- As stated above, for the answer is no. This was proved by Matiyasevich [Mat70], building on work by Davis, Putnam and Robinson [DPR61].
- Alpöge, Bhargava, Ho, and Shnidman [ABHS26] proved that if is the ring of integers of any number field then the answer is no.
Claimed Proofs
OpenAI has announced a proof that Hilbert's 10th problem over is undecidable. See here.
Notes
This question is known to be equivalent to the question of whether there is a decision procedure for the problem of determining whether a variety over has a rational point.
To give a negative answer to the question, it is enough to show that is diophantine over , i.e. that there is a polynomial over such that is in if and only if has a rational root.
Reference for the problem statement
[Poo03]Bjorn Poonen, Hilbert's tenth problem and Mazur's conjecture for large subrings of Q, Journal of the American Mathematical Society, 2003 [doi]
Additional References
[ABHS26]Levent Alpöge, Manjul Bhargava, Wei Ho, and Ari Shnidman, Rank stability in quadratic extensions and Hilbert’s tenth problem for the ring of integers of a number field, Inventiones Mathematicae, 2026 [doi]
[Mat70]Yuri Matiyasevich, The Diophantineness of enumerable sets, Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1970
[DPR61]Davis, Martin and Putnam, Hilary and Robinson, Julia, The decision problem for exponential diophantine equations, Annals of Mathematics, 1961 [doi]
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