J. V. Armitage - Böcker

For a number of years, French mathematicians have run regular number theory conferences to which they have invited number theorists from many countries. To repay their hospitality, the London Mathematical Society arranged for the 1980 'Journees Arithmeiques' to be held in Exeter. The papers published here are either based on the main invited lectures or on selected research talks given at the conference. They cover all branches of the subject: combinatorial and elementary methods; analytic number theory; transcendence theory; Galois module theory and algebraic number theory in general; elliptic curves and modular functions; local fields; additive number theory; Diophantine geometry, and uniform distribution. It will be necessary reading for all those undertaking research in number theory.

In its first six chapters this 2006 text seeks to present the basic ideas and properties of the Jacobi elliptic functions as an historical essay, an attempt to answer the fascinating question: 'what would the treatment of elliptic functions have been like if Abel had developed the ideas, rather than Jacobi?' Accordingly, it is based on the idea of inverting integrals which arise in the theory of differential equations and, in particular, the differential equation that describes the motion of a simple pendulum. The later chapters present a more conventional approach to the Weierstrass functions and to elliptic integrals, and then the reader is introduced to the richly varied applications of the elliptic and related functions. Applications spanning arithmetic (solution of the general quintic, the functional equation of the Riemann zeta function), dynamics (orbits, Euler's equations, Green's functions), and also probability and statistics, are discussed.