Unit equation over a number field

ID: unit-equation-over-a-number-field

For fixed nonzero in a number field, this equation has finitely many unit solutions. By the Dirichlet unit theorem, a large unit-exponent vector makes one unit exponentially small at some archimedean embedding. The equation makes the other fixed multiple exponentially close to one. Its principal logarithm is a nonzero linear form in fixed algebraic logarithms, with coefficients bounded by the exponent size; a polynomial lower bound contradicts the exponential upper bound. Finite torsion and finitely many embeddings allow uniform constants.

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