A very primitive form of this monograph has existed for about two and a half years in the form of handwritten notes of a course that Alain Y ger gave at the University of Maryland. The objective, all along, has been to present a coherent picture of the almost mysterious role that analytic methods and, in particular, multidimensional residues, have recently played in obtaining effective estimates for problems in commutative algebra [71;5]* Our original interest in the subject rested on the fact that the study of many questions in harmonic analysis, like finding all distribution solutions (or finding out whether there are any) to a system of linear partial differential equa­ tions with constant coefficients (or, more generally, convolution equations) in ]R. n, can be translated into interpolation problems in spaces of entire functions with growth conditions. This idea, which one can trace back to Euler, is the basis of Ehrenpreis's Fundamental Principle for partial differential equations [37;5], [56;5], and has been explicitly stated, for convolution equations, in the work of Berenstein and Taylor [9;5] (we refer to the survey [8;5] for complete references. ) One important point in [9;5] was the use of the Jacobi interpo­ lation formula, but otherwise, the representation of solutions obtained in that paper were not explicit because of the use of a-methods to prove interpolation results.

Inhalt

1. Residue Currents in one Dimension. Different Approaches.- 1. Residue attached to a holomorphic function.- 2. Some other approaches to the residue current.- 3. Some variants of the classical Pompeiu formula.- 4. Some applications of Pompeiu's formulas. Local results.- 5. Some applications of Pompeiu's formulas. Global results.- References for Chapter 1.- 2. Integral Formulas in Several Variables.- 1. Chains and cochains, homology and cohomology.- 2. Cauchy's formula for test functions.- 3. Weighted Bochner-Martinelli formulas.- 4. Weighted Andreotti-Norguet formulas.- 5. Applications to systems of algebraic equations.- References for Chapter 2.- 3. Residue Currents and Analytic Continuation.- 1. Leray iterated residues.- 2. Multiplication of principal values and residue currents.- 3. The Dolbeault complex and the Grothendieck residue.- 4. Residue currents.- 5. The local duality theorem.- References for Chapter 3.- 4. The Cauchy-Weil Formula and its Consequences.- 1. The Cauchy-Weil formula.- 2. The Grothendieck residue in the discrete case.- 3. The Grothendieck residue in the algebraic case.- References for Chapter 4.- 5. Applications to Commutative Algebra and Harmonic Analysis.- 1. An analytic proof of the algebraic Nullstellensatz.- 2. The membership problem.- 3. The Fundamental Principle of L. Ehrenpreis.- 4. The role of the Mellin transform.- References for Chapter 5.