This book presents some of the most important aspects of rigid geometry, namely its applications to the study of smooth algebraic curves, of their Jacobians, and of abelian varieties - all of them defined over a complete non-archimedean valued field. The text starts with a survey of the foundation of rigid geometry, and then focuses on a detailed treatment of the applications. In the case of curves with split rational reduction there is a complete analogue to the fascinating theory of Riemann surfaces. In the case of proper smooth group varieties the uniformization and the construction of abelian varieties are treated in detail. Rigid geometry was established by John Tate and was enriched by a formal algebraic approach launched by Michel Raynaud. It has proved as a means to illustrate the geometric ideas behind the abstract methods of formal algebraic geometry as used by Mumford and Faltings. This book should be of great use to students wishing to enter this field, as well as those already working in it.

Mumford's famous "Red Book" gives a simple, readable account of the basic objects of algebraic geometry, preserving as much as possible their geometric flavor and integrating this with the tools of commutative algebra. It is aimed at graduates or mathematicians in other fields wishing to quickly learn aboutalgebraic geometry. This new edition includes an appendix that gives an overview of the theory of curves, their moduli spaces and their Jacobians -- one of the most exciting fields within algebraic geometry.

This second volume introduces the concept of shemes, reviews some commutative algebra and introduces projective schemes. The finiteness theorem for coherent sheaves is proved, here again the techniques of homological algebra and sheaf cohomology are needed. In the last two chapters, projective curves over an arbitrary ground field are discussed, the theory of Jacobians is developed, and the existence of the Picard scheme is proved. Finally, the author gives some outlook into further developments- for instance étale cohomology- and states some fundamental theorems.

This volume contains a collection of papers on algebraic curves and their applications. While algebraic curves traditionally have provided a path toward modern algebraic geometry, they also provide many applications in number theory, computer security and cryptography, coding theory, differential equations, and more. Papers cover topics such as the rational torsion points of elliptic curves, arithmetic statistics in the moduli space of curves, combinatorial descriptions of semistable hyperelliptic curves over local fields, heights on weighted projective spaces, automorphism groups of curves, hyperelliptic curves, dessins d'enfants, applications to Painlevé equations, descent on real algebraic varieties, quadratic residue codes based on hyperelliptic curves, and Abelian varieties and cryptography. This book will be a valuable resource for people interested in algebraic curves and their connections to other branches of mathematics.

This book and the following second volume is an introduction into modern algebraic geometry. In the first volume the methods of homological algebra, theory of sheaves, and sheaf cohomology are developed. These methods are indispensable for modern algebraic geometry, but they are also fundamental for other branches of mathematics and of great interest in their own. In the last chapter of volume I these concepts are applied to the theory of compact Riemann surfaces. In this chapter the author makes clear how influential the ideas of Abel, Riemann and Jacobi were and that many of the modern methods have been anticipated by them.

The authors study the Jacobian $J$ of the smooth projective curve $C$ of genus $r-1$ with affine model $y^r = x^r-1(x + 1)(x + t)$ over the function field $mathbb F_p(t)$, when $p$ is prime and $rge 2$ is an integer prime to $p$. When $q$ is a power of $p$ and $d$ is a positive integer, the authors compute the $L$-function of $J$ over $mathbb F_q(t^1/d)$ and show that the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture holds for $J$ over $mathbb F_q(t^1/d)$.