Tanush Shaska - Böcker

The legacy of Galois was the beginning of Galois theory as well as group theory. From this common origin, the development of group theory took its own course, which led to great advances in the latter half of the 20th cen­ tury. It was John Thompson who shaped finite group theory like no-one else, leading the way towards a major milestone of 20th century mathematics, the classification of finite simple groups. After the classification was announced around 1980, it was again J. Thomp­ son who led the way in exploring its implications for Galois theory. The first question is whether all simple groups occur as Galois groups over the rationals (and related fields), and secondly, how can this be used to show that all finite groups occur (the 'Inverse Problem of Galois Theory'). What are the implica­ tions for the stmcture and representations of the absolute Galois group of the rationals (and other fields)? Various other applications to algebra and number theory have been found, most prominently, to the theory of algebraic curves (e.g., the Guralnick-Thompson Conjecture on the Galois theory of covers of the Riemann sphere).

The theme of this book are the interactions between group theory and algebra/geometry/number theory, showing ubiquity and power of the basic principle of Galois theory. The book presents recent developments in a major line of work about covers of the projective line (and other curves), their fields of definition and parameter spaces, and associated questions about arithmetic fundamental groups. This is intimately tied up with the Inverse Problem of Galois Theory, and uses methods of algebraic geometry, group theory and number theory.

The development of new computational techniques and better computing power has made it possible to attack some classical problems of algebraic geometry. The main goal of this book is to highlight such computational techniques related to algebraic curves. The area of research in algebraic curves is receiving more interest not only from the mathematics community, but also from engineers and computer scientists, because of the importance of algebraic curves in applications including cryptography, coding theory, error-correcting codes, digital imaging, computer vision, and many more.This book covers a wide variety of topics in the area, including elliptic curve cryptography, hyperelliptic curves, representations on some Riemann-Roch spaces of modular curves, computation of Hurwitz spectra, generating systems of finite groups, Galois groups of polynomials, among other topics.