A conjecture due to Honda predicts that given any abelian variety over a number field $K$, all of its quadratic twists (or twists of a fixed order in general) have bounded Mordell-Weil rank. About 15 years ago, Rubin and Silverberg obtained an analytic criterion for Honda's conjecture for a family of quadratic twists of an elliptic curve defined over the field of rational numbers. In this paper, we consider this problem over number fields. We will prove that the existence of a uniform upper bound for the ranks of elliptic curves in this family is equivalent to the convergence of a certain infinite series. This result extends the work of Rubin and Silverberg over $\mathbb Q$.
For a rank-$1$ matrix $A= {\bold a \bold b}^t$, we define the perimeter of $A$ as the number of nonzero entries in both $\bold a$ and $\bold b$. We characterize the linear operators which preserve the rank and perimeter of rank-$1$ matrices over semifields. That is, a linear operator $T$ preserves the rank and perimeter of rank-$1$ matrices over semifields if and only if it has the form $T(A)=U A V$, or $T(A)=U A^t V$ with some invertible matrices U and V.
The concept of rank of a commutative cancellative semigroup is extended to all commutative semigroups S by defining rank S as the supremum of cardinalities of finite independent subsets of S. Representing such a semigroup S as a semilattice Y of (archimedean) components Sα, we prove that rank S is the supremum of ranks of various Sα. Representing a commutative separative semigroup S as a semilattice of its (cancellative) archimedean components, the main result of the paper provides several characterizations of rank S; in particular if rank S is finite. Subdirect products of a semilattice and a commutative cancellative semigroup are treated briefly. We give a classification of all commutative separative semigroups which admit a generating set of one or two elements, and compute their ranks.