Warning! — Theorems ahead

Don't worry, no danger ahead! — This is just a short post about the German mathematician Ewald Warning and the theorems that bear his name.

It seems that Ewald Warning's name will be forever linked with that of Chevalley, for the Chevalley-Warning theorem is one of the rare modern results that can be taught to undergraduate students; in France, it is especially famous at the Agrégation level. (Warning published a second paper, in 1959, about the axioms of plane geometry.)

Warning's paper, Bemerkung zur vorstehenden Arbeit von Herrn Chevalley (About a previous work of Mr Chevalley), has been published in 1935 in the Publications of the mathematical seminar of Hamburg University (Abhandlungen aus dem Mathematischen Seminar der Universität Hamburg), just after the mentioned paper of Chevalley. Emil Artin had a position in Hamburg at that time, which probably made the seminar very attractive; as a matter of fact, the same 1935 volume features a paper of Weil about Riemann-Roch, one of Burau about braids, one of Élie Cartan about homogeneous spaces, one of Santalo on geometric measure theory, etc.

1. The classic statement of the Chevalley—Warning theorem is the following.

Theorem 1. – Let $p$ be a prime number, let $q$ be a power of $p$ and let $F$ be a field with $q$ elements. Let $f_1,\dots,f_m$ be polynomials in $n$ variables and coefficients in $F$, of degrees $d_1,\dots,d_m$; let $d=d_1+\dots+d_m$. Let $Z=Z(f_1,\dots,f_m)$ be their zero-set in $F^n$. If $d<n$, then $p$ divides $\mathop{\rm Card}(Z)$.

This is really a theorem of Warning, and Chevalley's theorem was the weaker consequence that if $Z\neq\emptyset$, then $Z$ contains at least two points. (In fact, Chevalley only considers the case $q=p$, but his proof extends readily.) The motivation of Chevalley lied in the possibility to apply this remark to the reduced norm of a possibly noncommutative finite field (a polynomial of degree $d$ in $d^2$ variables which vanishes exactly at the origin), thus providing a proof of Wedderburn's theorem.

a) Chevalley's proof begins with a remark. For any polynomial $f\in F[T_1,\ldots,T_n]$, let $f^*$ be the polynomial obtained by replacing iteratively $X_i^q$ by $X_i$ in $f$, until the degree of $f$ in each variable is $<q$. For all $a\in F^n$, one has $f(a)=f^*(a)$; moreover, using the fact that a polynomial in one variable of degree $<q$ has at most $q$ roots, one proves that if $f(a)=0$ for all $a\in F^n$, then $f^*=0$.

Assume now that $Z$ contains exactly one point, say $a\in F^n$, let $f=\prod (1-f_j^{q-1})$, let $g_a=\prod (1-(x_i-a_i)^{q-1})$. Both polynomials take the value $1$ at $x=a$, and $0$ elsewhere; moreover, $g_a$ is reduced. Consequently, $f^*=g$. Then
$$(q-1)n=\deg(g_a)=\deg(f^*)\leq \deg(f)=(q-1)\sum \deg(f_j)=(q-1)d,$$
contradicting the hypothesis that $d<n$.

b) Warning's proof is genuinely different. He first defines, for any subset $A$ of $F^n$ a reduced polynomial $g_A=\sum_{a\in A} g_a=\sum_{a\in A}\prod (1-(x_i-a_i)^{q-1})$, and observes that $g_A(a)=1$ if $a\in A$, and $g_A(a)=0$ otherwise.
Take $A=Z$, so that $f^*=g_Z$. Using that $\deg(f^*)\leq \deg(f)=(q-1)d$ and the expansion
$(x-a)^{q-1} = \sum_{i=0}^{q-1} x^i a^{q-1-i}$, Warning derives from the equality $f^*=g_Z$
the relations
$$\sum_{a\in Z} a_1^{\nu_1}\dots a_n^{\nu_n}=0,$$
for all $(\nu_1,\dots,\nu_n)$ such that $0\leq \nu_i\leq q-1$ and $\sum\nu_i <(q-1)(n-d)$. The particular case $\nu=0$ implies that $p$ divides $\mathop{\rm Card}(Z)$. More generally:

Proposition 2. — For every polynomial $\phi\in F[T_1,\dots,T_n]$ of reduced degree $<(q-1)(n-d)$, one has $\sum_{a\in A} \phi(a) = 0$.

c) The classic proof of that result is even easier. Let us recall it swiftly. First of all, for every integer $\nu$ such that $0\leq \nu <q$, one has $\sum_{a\in F} a^\nu=0$. This can be proved in many ways, for example by using the fact that the multiplicative group of $F$ is cyclic; on the other hand, for every nonzero element $t$ of $F$, the change of variables $a=tb$ leaves this sum both unchanged and multiplied by $t^\nu,$ so that taking $t$ such that $t^\nu\neq 1$, one sees that this sum vanishes. It follows from that that for every polynomial $f\in F[T_1,\dots,T_n]$ whose degree in some variable is $\lt q-1$, one has $\sum_{a\in F^n} f(a)=0$. This holds in particular if the total degree of $f$ is $\lt (q-1)n$.
Taking $f$ as above proves theorem 1.

2. On the other hand there is a second Warning theorem, which seems to be absolutely neglected in France. It says the following:

Theorem 3. — Keep the same notation as in theorem 1. If $Z$ is nonempty, then $\mathop{\rm Card}(Z)\geq q^{n-d}$.

To prove this result, Warning starts from the following proposition:

Proposition 4. – Let $L,L'$ be two parallel subspaces of dimension $d$ in $F^n$. Then $\mathop{\rm Card}(Z\cap L)$ and $\mathop{\rm Card}(Z\cap L')$ are congruent modulo $p$.

Let $r=n-d$. Up to a change of coordinates, one may assume that $L=\{x_1=\dots=x_{r}=0\}$ and $L'=\{x_1-1=x_2=\dots=x_{r}=0\}$. Let
$$\phi = \frac{1-x_1^{q-1}}{1-x_1} (1-x_2^{q-1})\cdots (1-x_{r}^{q-1}).$$
This is a polynomial of total degree is $(q-1)r-1<(q-1)(n-d)$. For $a\in F^n$, one has $\phi(a)=1$ if $a\in L$, $\phi(a)=-1$ if $a\in L'$, and $\phi(a)=0$ otherwise. Proposition 4 thus follows from proposition 2. It is now very easy to prove theorem 3 in the particular case where there exists one subspace $L$ of dimension $d$ such that $\mathop{\rm Card}(Z\cap L)\not\equiv 0\pmod p$. Indeed, by proposition 4, the same congruence will hold for every translate $L'$ of $L$. In particular, $\mathop{\rm Card}(Z\cap L')\neq0$ for every translate $L'$ of $L$, and there are $q^{n-d}$ distinct translates.

To prove the general case, let us choose a subspace $M$ of $F^n$ of dimension $s\leq d$ such that $\mathop{\rm Card}(Z\cap M)\not\equiv 0\pmod p$, and let us assume that $s$ is maximal.
Assume that $s< d$. Let $t\in\{1,\dots,p-1\}$ be the integer such that $\mathop{\rm Card}(Z\cap M)\equiv t\pmod p$. For every $(s+1)$-dimensional subspace $L$ of $F^n$ that contains $M$, one has $\mathop{\rm Card}(Z\cap L)\equiv 0\pmod p$, by maximaility of $s$, so that $Z\cap (L\setminus M)$ contains at least $p-t$ points. Since these subspaces $L$ are in 1-1 correspondence with the lines of the quotient space $F^n/M$, their number is equal to $(q^{n-s}-1)/(q-1)$. Consequently, $$\mathop{\rm Card}(Z) = \mathop{\rm Card}(Z\cap M) + \sum_L \mathop{\rm Card}(Z\cap (L\setminus M)) \geq t + (p-t) \frac{q^{n-s}-1}{q-1} \geq q^{n-s-1}\geq q^{n-d},$$ as was to be shown.

3. Classic theorems seem to an everlasting source of food for thought.

a) In 1999, Alon observed that Chevalley's theorem follows from the Combinatorial Nullstellensatz he had just proved. On the other hand, this approach allowed Brink (2011) to prove a similar result in general fields $F$, but restricting the roots to belong to a product set $A_1\times\dots\times A_n$, where $A_1,\dots,A_n$ are finite subsets of $F$ of cardinality $q$. See that paper of Clarke, Forrow and Schmitt for further developments, in particular a version of Warning's second theorem.

b) In the case of hypersurfaces (with the notation of theorem 1, $m=1$), Ax proved in 1964 that the cardinality of $Z$ is divisible not only by $p$, but by $q$. This led to renewed interest in the following years, especially in the works of Katz, Esnault, Berthelot, and the well has not dried up yet.

c) In 2011, Heath-Brown published a paper where he uses Ax's result to strengthen the congruence modulo $p$ of proposition 4 to a congruence modulo $q$.

d) By a Weil restriction argument, a 1995 paper of Moreno-Moreno partially deduces the Chevalley-Warning theorem over a field of cardinality $q$ from its particular case over the prime field. I write partially because they obtain a divisibility by an expression of the form $p^{\lceil f \alpha\rceil}$, while one expects $q^{\lceil \alpha}=p^{f\lceil\alpha\rceil}$. However, the same argument allows them to obtain a stronger bound which does not involve not the degrees of the polynomials, but the $p$-weights of these degrees, that is the sum of their digits in their base $p$ expansions. Again, they obtain a divisibility by an expression of the form $p^{\lceil f\beta\rceil}$, and it is a natural question to wonder whether the divisibility by $p^{f\lceil\beta\rceil}$ can be proved.