A digestion of the Jacobian conjecture counterexample

Updates on my research and expository papers, discussion of open problems, and other maths-related topics. By Terence Tao

21 July, 2026 in math.AG | Tags: Jacobian conjecture , polynomials | by Terence Tao

The notorious Jacobian conjecture can be formulated concretely over the complex numbers as follows.

The condition that the Jacobian is non-zero is equivalent to being locally invertible. (The implication of local invertibility from non-vanishing Jacobian follows from the inverse function theorem; the converse implication can be derived from the Weierstrass preparation theorem , but is omitted here.) Also, from the fundamental theorem of algebra, once the Jacobian polynomial is non-zero, it must be constant. So the hypothesis “Jacobian is a non-zero constant” can be replaced with “ is locally invertible”. So the Jacobian conjecture can be viewed as an assertion that local invertibility implies global invertibility. The complex numbers can be easily replaced with other fields of characteristic zero by the Lefschetz principle , but I prefer to work in the concrete setting of the complex numbers.

It was recently shown (using the Fable AI) that the conjecture is false in three dimensions (and thus in higher dimensions as well):

The conjecture remains open in two dimensions, and is easy to establish in one dimension.

The example can be stated completely explicitly: one can take

The example has since been retroactively explained in more geometric terms . As a “digestion” exercise to myself, I sought to write this explanation with relatively little use of algebraic geometry, in a manner that minimizes the amount of “miracles” required, although there are still a few places were some remarkable phenomena occur.

It is convenient to use the local injectivity formulation, and to generalize the domain to an equivalent affine variety. Namely, we will show

Clearly one can get from Theorem 3 to Theorem 2 by composing with the isomorphism and using the previously mentioned fact that local injectivity implies non-zero constant Jacobian. Our objective is now to find data , that obeys three separate properties:

It turns out that and can be built out of the operation of multiplication of low degree polynomials. Namely, consider the following three simple affine spaces:

The map , essentially a map from to , is clearly polynomial; it is given explicitly in coordinates as

The five-dimensional domain is of course larger than the four-dimensional range , so the map clearly cannot be injective. This can already be seen from the scaling symmetry, as the specific scalings

It will be convenient to “spend” the scaling symmetry to obtain a useful normalization. If is a linear polynomial and is a quadratic polynomial, the resultant can be defined by the determinant

We now have a restricted multiplication map (which by abuse of notation we will continue to call ) from the four-dimensional variety

But we now also have property (a)! Suppose we want to show the local injectivity of in the neighborhood of a pair with . As the resultant is non-vanishing, the root of (which exists in the Riemann sphere, or projective line if you prefer) is distinct from the two roots of (though the latter two roots could be equal to each other). Applying the action (which performs Möbius transforms on the roots), one can assume without loss of generality that is the point at infinity (or equivalently ), thus for some complex number and for some complex numbers , with the resultant condition (7) simplifies to (so in particular are also non-zero). It is then clear that if one perturbs and by a small amount (say, modifying each coefficient by ), then the root of will perturb to something large ( ), while the roots of stay bounded. Thus, just from knowledge of the product , one can reconstruct which of the three roots of this cubic polynomial will be the perturbed root of , and which two will be the perturbed roots of ; from this and (6) , (7) we can also reconstruct the leading coefficient of , and this completely determines both and . This establishes the local injectivity property (a). (In fact it is étale , but we will not need the machinery of étale maps here.)

Unfortunately, (the four-dimensional analogue of) condition (c) fails: the quadric hypersurface (8) is not isomorphic to the affine space . But we can try to get around this by passing to a three-dimensional slice. Let be some three-dimensional affine plane of (which we will take to avoid the origin for technical reasons), then we can restrict as a map from the set

Let’s see how. The affine hyperplanes in avoiding the origin are parameterized by the dual space of avoiding the origin, which one can think of as the non-zero third order homogeneous differential operators in two variables. Indeed, every such operator generates an affine hyperplane that avoids the origin, and conversely by duality every affine hyperplane avoiding the origin arises in this form uniquely. Just as the cubic polynomials in can be factored into three linear polynomials, the differential operators in the dual space can also be factored into three linear differential operators, e.g.,

It turns out that the affine miracle for (9) occurs precisely in the second case, when has two identical roots. I do not have a completely satisfactory geometric explanation for this miracle, but one can verify it by the following coordinate computation.

By applying the action, we can normalize so that , thus is now the affine hyperplane of cubic polynomials with . Using (2) and (5) , the variety (9) can now be described explicitly in coordinates as

So we just need to glue back in the fiber. Indeed, from (10) we see that the fiber at is just

The standard way to proceed here is to manipulate various tangent spaces using the modern machinery of algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, but given my own background, I prefer to adopt the language of analysis, and in particular big-O notation (in place of the ideals used in algebraic geometry), in order to investigate the limit by hand. On the variety (10) , let us use to denote any multiple of by a polynomial expression in . Thus, for instance, the equation implies that

We can get some more precise asymptotics by also taking advantage of (15) . Substituting into (15) , we obtain after some algebra

Expanding the error term in (16) as , and doing a little more algebra, we thus have a polynomial change of variables

The previous computations, when expanded out, also gives polynomial inverse maps:

AI disclosure: I used an AI chatbot to discuss various aspects of this problem and to confirm several of the calculations made here.

Beautiful explanation. Two very small corrections:

Likewise, “Recently, it was recently shown ” is redundant.

Is there some representation-theoretic or moduli-theoretic intuition — perhaps something about the interaction of the SL₂-orbit stratification of the dual space with the discriminant locus — that would allow one to foresee ahead of time that the double-root stratum (and only that stratum) gives rise to an affine slice, instead of needing to directly check that ? Would one expect this to be a low-dimensional curiosity, or is there some general principle for when a GIT-type quotient construction like this results in affine varieties?”

In my chatbot discussion I tried to pursue this line of thinking. As far as I could tell, there does not seem to be any plausible known set of computable invariants (including those that somehow take advantage of equivariant structure) that would force affine-ness, though perhaps some weaker “pseudo-affine” structure might be detectable by such a soft approach. But perhaps there are experts in algebraic geometry who will be able to give a more authoritative answer.

Also, from the fundamental theorem of algebra, once the Jacobian polynomial det(DF) is non-zero, it must be constant.

I might be missing something obvious—I see how the above follows via the Nullstellensatz, but not via the fundamental theorem of algebra per se (save insofar as the latter follows from the former).

The fundamental theorem of algebra tells us that any one-dimensional polynomial is either constant, or has at least one zero (over the complex numbers). By induction, the same is true in higher dimensions; so if a polynomial has no zeroes, it must be constant.

This feels like a too beautiful counterexample, almost too beautiful to be discovered by a human. Polynomial multiplication is the most natural algebraic object that is locally injective but globally non-injective.

There is also some discussion of this here: https://sbseminar.wordpress.com/2026/07/20/the-new-counterexample-to-the-jacobian-conjecture/

It seems that a similar-ish (rational) example was found by Vitushkin in 1999: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02674884

Nice! In retrospect the two constructions are rather similar. My chatbot was able to express the variety associated to the Vitushkin example in a form similar, but not identical, to (9), namely

with again the multiplication map (now generically two-to-one rather than three-to-one), but this variety is a punctured plane rather than the entire plane, so Vitushkin’s map acquires a pole. I don’t think the traces from the original AI attempt are currently available, but it is possible that it experimented with a large number of variants of this construction until finding the one that worked.

In the opposite direction, increasing the net degree of the polynomials beyond cubic seems to rapidly make the structure worse, and in particular non-affine. (Once one has more than three roots in play, the Mobius transform group is no longer transitive enough to keep the geometry behaving like a homogeneous space, and all sorts of generic algebraic geometry pathologies seem to seep back in.)

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