In the more than 100 years since the fundamental group was first introduced by Henri Poincaré it has evolved to play an important role in different areas of mathematics. Originally conceived as part of algebraic topology, this essential concept and its analogies have found numerous applications in mathematics that are still being investigated today, and which are explored in this volume, the result of a meeting at Heidelberg University that brought together mathematicians who use or study fundamental groups in their work with an eye towards applications in arithmetic. The book acknowledges the varied incarnations of the fundamental group: pro-finite, l-adic, p-adic, pro-algebraic and motivic. It explores a wealth of topics that range from anabelian geometry (in particular the section conjecture), the l-adic polylogarithm, gonality questions of modular curves, vector bundles in connection with monodromy, and relative pro-algebraic completions, to a motivic version of Minhyong Kim's non-abelian Chabauty method and p-adic integration after Coleman. The editor has also included the abstracts of all the talks given at the Heidelberg meeting, as well as the notes on Coleman integration and on Grothendieck's fundamental group with a view towards anabelian geometry taken from a series of introductory lectures given by Amnon Besser and Tamás Szamuely, respectively.

The section conjecture in anabelian geometry, announced by Grothendieck in 1983, is concerned with a description of the set of rational points of a hyperbolic algebraic curve over a number field in terms of the arithmetic of its fundamental group. While the conjecture is still open today in 2012, its study has revealed interesting arithmetic for curves and opened connections, for example, to the question whether the Brauer-Manin obstruction is the only one against rational points on curves. This monograph begins by laying the foundations for the space of sections of the fundamental group extension of an algebraic variety. Then, arithmetic assumptions on the base field are imposed and the local-to-global approach is studied in detail. The monograph concludes by discussing analogues of the section conjecture created by varying the base field or the type of variety, or by using a characteristic quotient or its birational analogue in lieu of the fundamental group extension.

In the more than 100 years since the fundamental group was first introduced by Henri Poincaré it has evolved to play an important role in different areas of mathematics. Originally conceived as part of algebraic topology, this essential concept and its analogies have found numerous applications in mathematics that are still being investigated today, and which are explored in this volume, the result of a meeting at Heidelberg University that brought together mathematicians who use or study fundamental groups in their work with an eye towards applications in arithmetic. The book acknowledges the varied incarnations of the fundamental group: pro-finite, l-adic, p-adic, pro-algebraic and motivic. It explores a wealth of topics that range from anabelian geometry (in particular the section conjecture), the l-adic polylogarithm, gonality questions of modular curves, vector bundles in connection with monodromy, and relative pro-algebraic completions, to a motivic version of Minhyong Kim's non-abelian Chabauty method and p-adic integration after Coleman. The editor has also included the abstracts of all the talks given at the Heidelberg meeting, as well as the notes on Coleman integration and on Grothendieck's fundamental group with a view towards anabelian geometry taken from a series of introductory lectures given by Amnon Besser and Tamás Szamuely, respectively.

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

The arithmetic and geometry of moduli spaces and their fundamental groups are a very active research area. This book offers a complete overview of developments made over the last decade. The papers in this volume examine the geometry of moduli spaces of curves with a function on them. The main players in Part 1 are the absolute Galois group $G {\mathbb Q $ of the algebraic numbers and its close relatives. By analyzing how $G {\mathbb Q $ acts on fundamental groups defined by Hurwitz moduli problems, the authors achieve a grand generalization of Serre's program from the 1960s. Papers in Part 2 apply $\theta$-functions and configuration spaces to the study of fundamental groups over positive characteristic fields. In this section, several authors use Grothendieck's famous lifting results to give extensions to wildly ramified covers. Properties of the fundamental groups have brought collaborations between geometers and group theorists. Several Part 3 papers investigate new versions of the genus 0 problem. In particular, this includes results severely limiting possible monodromy groups of sphere covers. Finally, Part 4 papers treat Deligne's theory of Tannakian categories and arithmetic versions of the Kodaira-Spencer map. This volume is geared toward graduate students and research mathematicians interested in arithmetic algebraic geometry.

This book describes the interaction between several key aspects of Galois theory based on Iwasawa theory, fundamental groups and automorphic forms. These ideas encompass a large portion of mainstream number theory and ramifications that are of interest to graduate students and researchers in number theory, algebraic geometry, topology and physics.

This introductory textbook describes fundamental groups and their topological soul mates, the covering spaces. The author provides several illustrative examples that touch upon different areas of mathematics, but in keeping with the books introductory aim, they are all quite elementary. Basic concepts are clearly defined, proofs are complete, and n