Higher Dimensional Varieties And Rational Points

Exploring the connections between arithmetic and geometric properties of algebraic varieties has been the object of much fruitful study for a long time, especially in the case of curves. The aim of the Summer School and Conference on "Higher Dimensional Varieties and Rational Points" held in Budapest, Hungary during September 2001 was to bring together students and experts from the arithmetic and geometric sides of algebraic geometry in order to get a better understanding of the current problems, interactions and advances in higher dimension. The lecture series and conference lectures assembled in this volume give a comprehensive introduction to students and researchers in algebraic geometry and in related fields to the main ideas of this rapidly developing area.

This text offers a collection of survey and research papers by leading specialists in the field documenting the current understanding of higher dimensional varieties. Recently, it has become clear that ideas from many branches of mathematics can be successfully employed in the study of rational and integral points. This book will be very valuable for researchers from these various fields who have an interest in arithmetic applications, specialists in arithmetic geometry itself, and graduate students wishing to pursue research in this area.

This book is motivated by the problem of determining the set of rational points on a variety, but its true goal is to equip readers with a broad range of tools essential for current research in algebraic geometry and number theory. The book is unconventional in that it provides concise accounts of many topics instead of a comprehensive account of just one—this is intentionally designed to bring readers up to speed rapidly. Among the topics included are Brauer groups, faithfully flat descent, algebraic groups, torsors, étale and fppf cohomology, the Weil conjectures, and the Brauer-Manin and descent obstructions. A final chapter applies all these to study the arithmetic of surfaces. The down-to-earth explanations and the over 100 exercises make the book suitable for use as a graduate-level textbook, but even experts will appreciate having a single source covering many aspects of geometry over an unrestricted ground field and containing some material that cannot be found elsewhere. The origins of arithmetic (or Diophantine) geometry can be traced back to antiquity, and it remains a lively and wide research domain up to our days. The book by Bjorn Poonen, a leading expert in the field, opens doors to this vast field for many readers with different experiences and backgrounds. It leads through various algebraic geometric constructions towards its central subject: obstructions to existence of rational points. —Yuri Manin, Max-Planck-Institute, Bonn It is clear that my mathematical life would have been very different if a book like this had been around at the time I was a student. —Hendrik Lenstra, University Leiden Understanding rational points on arbitrary algebraic varieties is the ultimate challenge. We have conjectures but few results. Poonen's book, with its mixture of basic constructions and openings into current research, will attract new generations to the Queen of Mathematics. —Jean-Louis Colliot-Thélène, Université Paris-Sud A beautiful subject, handled by a master. —Joseph Silverman, Brown University

This book is devoted to the study of rational and integral points on higher-dimensional algebraic varieties. It contains carefully selected research papers addressing the arithmetic geometry of varieties which are not of general type, with an emphasis on how rational points are distributed with respect to the classical, Zariski and adelic topologies. The present volume gives a glimpse of the state of the art of this rapidly expanding domain in arithmetic geometry. The techniques involve explicit geometric constructions, ideas from the minimal model program in algebraic geometry as well as analytic number theory and harmonic analysis on adelic groups.

This volume contains papers from the Short Thematic Program on Rational Points, Rational Curves, and Entire Holomorphic Curves and Algebraic Varieties, held from June 3-28, 2013, at the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques, Université de Montréal, Québec, Canada. The program was dedicated to the study of subtle interconnections between geometric and arithmetic properties of higher-dimensional algebraic varieties. The main areas of the program were, among others, proving density of rational points in Zariski or analytic topology on special varieties, understanding global geometric properties of rationally connected varieties, as well as connections between geometry and algebraic dynamics exploring new geometric techniques in Diophantine approximation. This book is co-published with the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques.

Number systems based on a finite collection of symbols, such as the 0s and 1s of computer circuitry, are ubiquitous in the modern age. Finite fields are the most important such number systems, playing a vital role in military and civilian communications through coding theory and cryptography. These disciplines have evolved over recent decades, and where once the focus was on algebraic curves over finite fields, recent developments have revealed the increasing importance of higher-dimensional algebraic varieties over finite fields. The papers included in this publication introduce the reader to recent developments in algebraic geometry over finite fields with particular attention to applications of geometric techniques to the study of rational points on varieties over finite fields of dimension of at least 2.