Poonen's conjecture on rational periodic points of quadratic polynomials

Let N4N\geq 4. A quadratic polynomial is a polynomial f(x)Q[x]f(x)\in\mathbb{Q}[x] of degree 22, and a rational point of period NN is an xQx\in\mathbb{Q} such that f(N)(x)=xf^{(N)}(x)=x but f(m)(x)xf^{(m)}(x)\ne x for every 1m<N1\leq m<N. Poonen's conjecture. If N4N\geq 4, then there is no quadratic polynomial f(x)Q[x]f(x)\in\mathbb{Q}[x] with a rational point of period NN. This extends the known non-existence results for rational periodic points of periods 44 and 55; the conjecture remains open for all N6N\geq 6.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Raghav Bhutani and Frederick Saia, “Replacement dynamics of binary quadratic forms”, arXiv:2508.05816 (2026).

Additional references

7 papers in this index state this conjecture (2009–2025). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:2310.18054, arXiv:2308.14202, arXiv:1810.02269, arXiv:1312.0491, arXiv:1210.6246, arXiv:0909.5050.

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