This book tells the story of the Riemann hypothesis for function fields (or curves) starting with Artin's 1921 thesis, covering Hasse's work in the 1930s on elliptic fields and more, and concluding with Weil's final proof in 1948. The main sources are letters which were exchanged among the protagonists during that time, found in various archives, mostly the University Library in Göttingen. The aim is to show how the ideas formed, and how the proper notions and proofs were found, providing a particularly well-documented illustration of how mathematics develops in general. The book is written for mathematicians, but it does not require any special knowledge of particular mathematical fields.

Autorentext

Roquette studierte in Erlangen, Berlin und Hamburg und wurde 1951 an der Universität Hamburg bei Helmut Hasse promoviert, Ab 1967 ist er Professor an der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, an der er 1996 emeritiert wurde. Roquette arbeitet über Zahl- und Funktionenkörper und speziell lokale p-adische Körper. Er wandte auch Methoden der Modelltheorie (Nonstandard Arithmetic) in der Zahlentheorie an, teilweise noch mit Abraham Robinson.. Er hat auch eine Reihe von Arbeiten zur Geschichte der Mathematik, insbesondere der Schulen von Helmut Hasse und Emmy Noether veröffentlicht. Roquette war 1975 Mitherausgeber der gesammelten Abhandlungen von Helmut Hasse und gab eine Zahlentheorie-Vorlesung von Erich Hecke aus dem Jahr 1920 neu heraus. Roquette ist seit 1978 Mitglied der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften[3] und seit 1985 der Deutschen Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina[4] sowie Ehrendoktor der Universität Duisburg-Essen und Ehrenmitglied der Mathematischen Gesellschaft Hamburg.

Klappentext

This book tells the story of the Riemann hypothesis for function fields (or curves) starting with Artin's 1921 thesis, covering Hasse's work in the 1930s on elliptic fields and more, and concluding with Weil's final proof in 1948. The main sources are letters which were exchanged among the protagonists during that time, found in various archives, mostly the University Library in Göttingen. The aim is to show how the ideas formed, and how the proper notions and proofs were found, providing a particularly well-documented illustration of how mathematics develops in general. The book is written for mathematicians, but it does not require any special knowledge of particular mathematical fields.

Inhalt

• Overture.- Setting the stage.- The Beginning: Artin's Thesis.- Building the Foundations.- Enter Hasse. - Diophantine Congruences. - Elliptic Function Fields. - More on Elliptic Fields. - Towards Higher Genus. - A Virtual Proof. - Intermission. - A.Weil. - Appendix. - References. - Index.