This is an introduction to diophantine geometry at the advanced graduate level. The book contains a proof of the Mordell conjecture which will make it quite attractive to graduate students and professional mathematicians. In each part of the book, the reader will find numerous exercises.
Diophantine problems represent some of the strongest aesthetic attractions to algebraic geometry. They consist in giving criteria for the existence of solutions of algebraic equations in rings and fields, and eventually for the number of such solutions. The fundamental ring of interest is the ring of ordinary integers Z, and the fundamental field of interest is the field Q of rational numbers. One discovers rapidly that to have all the technical freedom needed in handling general problems, one must consider rings and fields of finite type over the integers and rationals. Furthermore, one is led to consider also finite fields, p-adic fields (including the real and complex numbers) as representing a localization of the problems under consideration. We shall deal with global problems, all of which will be of a qualitative nature. On the one hand we have curves defined over say the rational numbers. Ifthe curve is affine one may ask for its points in Z, and thanks to Siegel, one can classify all curves which have infinitely many integral points. This problem is treated in Chapter VII. One may ask also for those which have infinitely many rational points, and for this, there is only Mordell's conjecture that if the genus is :;;; 2, then there is only a finite number of rational points.
Bridging the gap between novice and expert, the aim of this book is to present in a self-contained way a number of striking examples of current diophantine problems to which Arakelov geometry has been or may be applied. Arakelov geometry can be seen as a link between algebraic geometry and diophantine geometry. Based on lectures from a summer school for graduate students, this volume consists of 12 different chapters, each written by a different author. The first chapters provide some background and introduction to the subject. These are followed by a presentation of different applications to arithmetic geometry. The final part describes the recent application of Arakelov geometry to Shimura varieties and the proof of an averaged version of Colmez's conjecture. This book thus blends initiation to fundamental tools of Arakelov geometry with original material corresponding to current research. This book will be particularly useful for graduate students and researchers interested in the connections between algebraic geometry and number theory. The prerequisites are some knowledge of number theory and algebraic geometry.
"This book by a leading researcher and masterly expositor of the subject studies diophantine approximations to algebraic numbers and their applications to diophantine equations. The methods are classical, and the results stressed can be obtained without much background in algebraic geometry. In particular, Thue equations, norm form equations and S-unit equations, with emphasis on recent explicit bounds on the number of solutions, are included. The book will be useful for graduate students and researchers." (L'Enseignement Mathematique) "The rich Bibliography includes more than hundred references. The book is easy to read, it may be a useful piece of reading not only for experts but for students as well." Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum
The author had initiated a revision and translation of "Classical Diophantine Equations" prior to his death. Given the rapid advances in transcendence theory and diophantine approximation over recent years, one might fear that the present work, originally published in Russian in 1982, is mostly superseded. That is not so. A certain amount of updating had been prepared by the author himself before his untimely death. Some further revision was prepared by close colleagues. The first seven chapters provide a detailed, virtually exhaustive, discussion of the theory of lower bounds for linear forms in the logarithms of algebraic numbers and its applications to obtaining upper bounds for solutions to the eponymous classical diophantine equations. The detail may seem stark--- the author fears that the reader may react much as does the tourist on first seeing the centre Pompidou; notwithstanding that, Sprind zuk maintainsa pleasant and chatty approach, full of wise and interesting remarks. His emphases well warrant, now that the book appears in English, close studyand emulation. In particular those emphases allow him to devote the eighth chapter to an analysis of the interrelationship of the class number of algebraic number fields involved and the bounds on the heights of thesolutions of the diophantine equations. Those ideas warrant further development. The final chapter deals with effective aspects of the Hilbert Irreducibility Theorem, harkening back to earlier work of the author. There is no other congenial entry point to the ideas of the last two chapters in the literature.
This book presents in a unified and concrete way the beautiful and deep mathematics - both theoretical and computational - on which the explicit solution of an elliptic Diophantine equation is based. It collects numerous results and methods that are scattered in the literature. Some results are hidden behind a number of routines in software packages, like Magma and Maple; professional mathematicians very often use these routines just as a black-box, having little idea about the mathematical treasure behind them. Almost 20 years have passed since the first publications on the explicit solution of elliptic Diophantine equations with the use of elliptic logarithms. The "art" of solving this type of equation has now reached its full maturity. The author is one of the main persons that contributed to the development of this art. The monograph presents a well-balanced combination of a variety of theoretical tools (from Diophantine geometry, algebraic number theory, theory of linear forms in logarithms of various forms - real/complex and p-adic elliptic - and classical complex analysis), clever computational methods and techniques (LLL algorithm and de Weger's reduction technique, AGM algorithm, Zagier's technique for computing elliptic integrals), ready-to-use computer packages. A result is the solution in practice of a large general class of Diophantine equations.