{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/on-the-maximum-gonality-of-a-curve-over-a","title":"On the Maximum Gonality of a Curve over a Finite Field","arxiv_id":"2207.14307","date":"2022-07-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Xander Faber","Jon Grantham","Everett W. Howe"],"abstract":"The gonality of a smooth geometrically connected curve over a field $k$ is the smallest degree of a nonconstant $k$-morphism from the curve to the projective line. In general, the gonality of a curve of genus $g \\ge 2$ is at most $2g - 2$. Over finite fields, a result of F.K. Schmidt from the 1930s can be used to prove that the gonality is at most $g+1$. Via a mixture of geometry and computation, we improve this bound: for a curve of genus $g \\ge 5$ over a finite field, the gonality is at most $g$. For genus $g = 3$ and $g = 4$, the same result holds with exactly $217$ exceptions: There are two curves of genus $4$ and gonality $5$, and $215$ curves of genus $3$ and gonality $4$. The genus-$4$ examples were found in other papers, and we reproduce their equations here; in supplementary material, we provide equations for the genus-$3$ examples.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.14307v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.14307v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"on-the-maximum-gonality-of-a-curve-over-a","repo_url":"https://github.com/RationalPoint/excessive","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}