Curves And Abelian Varieties

This book presents lectures from a conference on "Modular Curves and Abelian Varieties'' at the Centre de Recerca Matemtica (Bellaterra, Barcelona). The articles in this volume present the latest achievements in this extremely active field and will be of interest both to specialists and to students and researchers. Many contributions focus on generalizations of the Shimura-Taniyama conjecture to varieties such as elliptic Q-curves and Abelian varieties of GL_2-type. The book also includes several key articles in the subject that do not correspond to conference lectures.

"This book is devoted to recent progress in the study of curves and abelian varieties. It discusses both classical aspects of this deep and beautiful subject as well as two important new developments, tropical geometry and the theory of log schemes." "In addition to original research articles, this book contains three surveys devoted to singularities of theta divisors. of compactified Jucobiuns of singular curves, and of "strange duality" among moduli spaces of vector bundles on algebraic varieties."--BOOK JACKET.

This classic book contains an introduction to systems of l-adic representations, a topic of great importance in number theory and algebraic geometry, as reflected by the spectacular recent developments on the Taniyama-Weil conjecture and Fermat's Last Theorem. The initial chapters are devoted to the Abelian case (complex multiplication), where one

This volume contains the proceedings of an AMS-IMS-SIAM Joint Summer Research Conference on the Schottky Problem, held in June 1990 at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The conference explored various aspects of the Schottky problem of characterizing Jacobians of curves among all abelian varieties. Some of the articles study related themes, including the moduli of stable vector bundles on a curve, Prym varieties and intermediate Jacobians, and special Jacobians with exotic polarizations or product structures.

Abelian varieties are special examples of projective varieties. As such theycan be described by a set of homogeneous polynomial equations. The theory ofabelian varieties originated in the beginning of the ninetheenth centrury with the work of Abel and Jacobi. The subject of this book is the theory of abelian varieties over the field of complex numbers, and it covers the main results of the theory, both classic and recent, in modern language. It is intended to give a comprehensive introduction to the field, but also to serve as a reference. The focal topics are the projective embeddings of an abelian variety, their equations and geometric properties. Moreover several moduli spaces of abelian varieties with additional structure are constructed. Some special results onJacobians and Prym varieties allow applications to the theory of algebraic curves. The main tools for the proofs are the theta group of a line bundle, introduced by Mumford, and the characteristics, to be associated to any nondegenerate line bundle. They are a direct generalization of the classical notion of characteristics of theta functions.

This graduate-level textbook introduces the classical theory of complex tori and abelian varieties, while presenting in parallel more modern aspects of complex algebraic and analytic geometry. Beginning with complex elliptic curves, the book moves on to the higher-dimensional case, giving characterizations from different points of view of those complex tori which are abelian varieties, i.e., those that can be holomorphically embedded in a projective space. This allows, on the one hand, for illuminating the computations of nineteenth-century mathematicians, and on the other, familiarizing readers with more recent theories. Complex tori are ideal in this respect: One can perform "hands-on" computations without the theory being totally trivial. Standard theorems about abelian varieties are proved, and moduli spaces are discussed. Recent results on the geometry and topology of some subvarieties of a complex torus are also included. The book contains numerous examples and exercises. It is a very good starting point for studying algebraic geometry, suitable for graduate students and researchers interested in algebra and algebraic geometry. Information for our distributors: SMF members are entitled to AMS member discounts.

The theory of elliptic curves is distinguished by its long history and by the diversity of the methods that have been used in its study. This book treats the arithmetic approach in its modern formulation, through the use of basic algebraic number theory and algebraic geometry. Following a brief discussion of the necessary algebro-geometric results, the book proceeds with an exposition of the geometry and the formal group of elliptic curves, elliptic curves over finite fields, the complex numbers, local fields, and global fields. Final chapters deal with integral and rational points, including Siegels theorem and explicit computations for the curve Y = X + DX, while three appendices conclude the whole: Elliptic Curves in Characteristics 2 and 3, Group Cohomology, and an overview of more advanced topics.

It is with considerable pleasure that we have seen in recent years the simplifications expected by Weil realize themselves, and it has seemed timely to incorporate them into a new book. We treat exclusively abelian varieties, and have summarized in a first chapter all the general results on algebraic groups that are used in the sequel. We then deal with the Jacobian variety of a curve, the Albanese variety of an arbitrary variety, and its Picard variety, i.e., the theory of cycles of dimension 0 and co dimension 1. The numerical theory which gives the number of points of finite order on an abelian variety, and the properties of the trace of an endomorphism are simple formal consequences of the theory of the Picard variety and of numerical equivalence. The same thing holds for the Lefschetz fixed point formula for a curve, and hence for the Riemann hypothesis for curves. Roughly speaking, it can be said that the theory of the Albanese and Picard variety incorporates in purely algebraic terms the theory which in the classical case would be that of the first homology group.