Curves of every genus with many points. II. Asymptotically good families

Abstract

We resolve a 1983 question of Serre by constructing curves with many points of every genus over every finite field. More precisely, we show that for every prime power q there is a positive constant cq with the following property: for every integer g≥0, there is a genus-g curve over Fq with at least cqg rational points over Fq. Moreover, we show that there exists a positive constant d such that for every q we can choose cq=d log q. We show also that there is a constant c>0 such that for every q and every n>0, and for every sufficiently Show more