During the winter term 1987/88 I gave a course at the University of Bonn under the title "Manifolds and Modular Forms." Iwanted to develop the theory of "Elliptic Genera" and to leam it myself on this occasion. This theory due to Ochanine, Landweber, Stong and others was relatively new at the time. The word "genus" is meant in the sense of my book "Neue Topologische Methoden in der Algebraischen Geometrie" published in 1956: A genus is a homomorphism of the Thom cobordism ring of oriented compact manifolds into the complex numbers. Fundamental examples are the signature and the A-genus. The...

This is a translation of "Auto ur du theoreme de Mordell-Weil," a course given by J . -P. Serre at the College de France in 1980 and 1981. These notes were originally written weekly by Michel Waldschmidt and have been reproduced by Publications Mathematiques de l'Universite de Paris VI, by photocopying the handwritten manuscript. The present translation follows roughly the French text, with many modi fications and rearrangements. We have not tried to give a detailed account of the new results due to Faltings, Raynaud, Gross-Zagier . . .; we have just mentioned them in notes at the appropriate...

In late 1917 Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia each announced several results regarding the iteration ofrational functions of a single complex variable in the Comptes rendus of the French Academy of Sciences. These brief notes were the tip of an iceberg. In 1918 Julia published a long and fascinating treatise on the subject, which was followed in 1919 by an equally remarkable study, the first instalIment of a three part memoir by Fatou. Together these works form the bedrock of the contemporary study of complex dynamics. This book had its genesis in a question put to me by Paul Blanchard. Why did...

This book consists of the notes from the seminar Bonn/ Wuppertal 1983/ 84 on Arithmetic Geometry. It contains a proof for the Mordell conjecture and may be useful as an introduction to Arakelov's point of view in diophantine geometry. The third edition includes an appendix in which a detailed survey on the spectacular recent developments in arithmetic algebraic geometry is given. These beautiful new results have their roots in the material covered by this book.

During the winter term 1987/88 I gave a course at the University of Bonn under the title "Manifolds and Modular Forms." I wanted to develop the theory of "Elliptic Genera" and to learn it myself on this occasion. This theory due to Ochanine, Landweber, Stong and others was relatively new at the time. The word "genus" is meant in the sense of my book "Neue Topologische Methoden in der Algebraischen Geometrie" published in 1956: A genus is a homomorphism of the Thorn cobordism ring of oriented compact manifolds into the complex numbers. Fundamental examples are the signature and the A-genus....

The book in hand is based on lectures which were given at the University of Bonn in the winter semesters of 1989/90 and 1990/91. The aim of the lectures was to present an elementary, self-contained introduction into some important aspects of the theory of global, small, smooth solutions to initial value problems for non linear evolution equa tions. The addressed audience included graduate students of both mathematics and physics who were only assumed to have abasie knowledge of linear partial differential equations. Thus, in the spirit of the underlying series, this book is intended to serve...

This book gives an introduction to the modern theory of special functions. It focuses on the nonlinear Painleve differential equation and its solutions, the so-called Painleve functions. It contains modern treatments of the Gauss hypergeometric differential equation, monodromy of second order Fuchsian equations and nonlinear differential equations near singular points.The book starts from an elementary level requiring only basic notions of differential equations, function theory and group theory. Graduate students should be able to work with the text."The authors do an excellent job of...

Die vorliegende Einftihrung in die Invariantentheorie entstand aus einer Vorlesung, welche ich im Wintersemester 1977/78 in Bonn gehalten habe.Wie schon der Titel ausdruckt stehen dabei die geometrischen Aspekte im Vordergrund. Aufbauend auf einfachen Kenntnissen aus der Algebra wer den die Grundlagen der Theorie der algebraischen Transformationsgruppen entwickelt und eine Reihe klassischer und moderner Fragestellungen aus der Invariantentheorie behandelt. Der Leser wird dabei bis an die heutige Forschung herangeftihrt und sollte dann auch in der Lage sein, die ent sprechende...