Icosahedral galois extensions and elliptic curves

This paper is devoted to the last unsolved case of the Artin Conjecture in two dimensions. Given an irreducible 2-dimensional complex representation of the absolute Galois group of a number fieldF, the Artin Conjecture states that the associatedL-series is entire. The conjecture has been proved for all cases except the icosahedral one. In this paper we construct icosahedral representations of the absolute Galois group of ℚ(√5) by means of 5-torsion points of an elliptic curve defined over ℚ. We compute the L-series explicitely as an Euler product, giving algorithms for determining the factors at the difficult primes. We also prove a formula for the conductor of the elliptic representation.