Roots of unity and projective equivalence

Abstract

Existing results of Fu show that, if two finite sets of roots of unity are projectively equivalent by a projective automorphism that does not act bijectively on the set of all roots of unity, then these sets consist of at most 14 points. Moreover, Fu constructs the two possible maximal sets, which are unique up to projective equivalence. In this article, we give an elementary proof that the cardinality of two such sets is at most 18 using the methods of Beukers and Smyth. Moreover, we show precisely how their method fails to give the tightest bound in the maximal cases of Fu.