The first part of this book provides an elementary and self-contained exposition of classical Galois theory and its applications to questions of solvability of algebraic equations in explicit form. The second part describes a surprising analogy between the fundamental theorem of Galois theory and the classification of coverings over a topological space. The third part contains a geometric description of finite algebraic extensions of the field of meromorphic functions on a Riemann surface and provides an introduction to the topological Galois theory developed by the author. All results are presented in the same elementary and self-contained manner as classical Galois theory, making this book both useful and interesting to readers with a variety of backgrounds in mathematics, from advanced undergraduate students to researchers.

The book's main concern is automorphisms of Riemann surfaces, giving a foundational treatment from the point of view of Galois coverings, and treating the problem of the largest automorphism group for a Riemann surface of a given genus. In addition, the extent to which fixed points of automorphisms are generalized Weierstrass points is considered. The extremely useful inequality of Castelnuovo- Severi is also treated. While the methods are elementary, much of the material does not appear in the current texts on Riemann surfaces, algebraic curves. The book is accessible to a reader who has had an introductory course on the theory of Riemann surfaces or algebraic curves.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Mathematics - Algebra, grade: 1,0, Free University of Berlin (Mathematik), language: English, abstract: This thesis deals with the correlation of the fundamental group and the Galois group, using their corresponding entities of covering spaces and field extensions. First it is viewed in the general setting of categories, using the language of Galois categories. It is shown that the categories of the finite étale algebras and the category of covering spaces are correlated, which gives the fact that the profinite completion of the fundamental group and the absolute Galois group are similar. More specifically, on Riemann surfaces it is shown that there exists an anti-equivalence of categories between the finite field extensions of the meromorphic functions of a compact, connected Riemann Surface X and the category of branched coverings of X. A more explicit theorem, that provides an isomorphism between a specific Galois Group and the profinite Completion of the Fundamental Group of a pointed X, gives more insight on the behaviour of these two groups.

Galois theory has such close analogies with the theory of coverings that algebraists use a geometric language to speak of field extensions, while topologists speak of "Galois coverings". This book endeavors to develop these theories in a parallel way, starting with that of coverings, which better allows the reader to make images. The authors chose a plan that emphasizes this parallelism. The intention is to allow to transfer to the algebraic framework of Galois theory the geometric intuition that one can have in the context of coverings. This book is aimed at graduate students and mathematicians curious about a non-exclusively algebraic view of Galois theory.

Assuming little technical background, the author presents the strong analogies between these two concepts starting at an elementary level.

This book grew out of lectures on Riemann surfaces given by Otto Forster at the universities of Munich, Regensburg, and Münster. It provides a concise modern introduction to this rewarding subject, as well as presenting methods used in the study of complex manifolds in the special case of complex dimension one. From the reviews: "This book deserves very serious consideration as a text for anyone contemplating giving a course on Riemann surfaces."—-MATHEMATICAL REVIEWS