The main theme of this book is the theory of heights as they appear in various guises. This includes a large body of results on Mahlers measure of the height of a polynomial. The authors'approach is very down to earth as they cover the rationals, assuming no prior knowledge of elliptic curves. The chapters include examples and particular computations, with all special calculation included so as to be self-contained. The authors devote space to discussing Mahlers measure and to giving some convincing and original examples to explain this phenomenon. XXXXXXX NEUER TEXT The main theme of this book is the theory of heights as it appears in various guises. To this §End.txt.Int.:, it examines the results of Mahlers measure of the height of a polynomial, which have never before appeared in book form. The authors take a down-to-earth approach that includes convincing and original examples. The book uncovers new and interesting connections between number theory and dynamics and will be interesting to researchers in both number theory and nonlinear dynamics.

Inhalt

1. Lehmer, Mahler and Jensen.- 2. Dynamical Systems.- 3. Mahler's Measure in Many Variables.- 4. Higher-Dimensional Dynamical Systems.- 5. Elliptic Heights.- 6. The Elliptic Mahler Measure.- A. Algebra.- A.1 Algebraic Integers.- A.2 Integer Matrices.- A.3 Hilbert's Nullstellensatz.- B. Analysis.- B.1 Stone-Weierstrass Theorem.- B.2 The Gelfand Transform.- C. Division Polynomials.- E.1 Lehmer Primes.- E.2 Elliptic Primes.- F. Exercises and Questions.- F.1 Hints for the Exercises.- F.2 List of Questions.- G. List of Notation.