This book is devoted to the structure of the absolute Galois groups of certain algebraic extensions of the field of rational numbers. Its main result, a theorem proved by the authors and Florian Pop in 2012, describes the absolute Galois group of distinguished semi-local algebraic (and other) extensions of the rational numbers as free products of the free profinite group on countably many generators and local Galois groups. This is an instance of a positive answer to the generalized inverse problem of Galois theory.Adopting both an arithmetic and probabilistic approach, the book carefully...

This book uses algebraic tools to study the elementary properties of classes of fields and related algorithmic problems. The first part covers foundational material on infinite Galois theory, profinite groups, algebraic function fields in one variable and plane curves. It provides complete and elementary proofs of the Chebotarev density theorem and the Riemann hypothesis for function fields, together with material on ultraproducts, decision procedures, the elementary theory of algebraically closed fields, undecidability and nonstandard model theory, including a nonstandard proof of Hilbert's...