The algebraic techniques developed by Kakde will almost certainly lead eventually to major progress in the study of congruences between automorphic forms and the main conjectures of non-commutative Iwasawa theory for many motives. Non-commutative Iwasawa theory has emerged dramatically over the last decade, culminating in the recent proof of the non-commutative main conjecture for the Tate motive over a totally real p-adic Lie extension of a number field, independently by Ritter and Weiss on the one hand, and Kakde on the other. The initial ideas for giving a precise formulation of the non-commutative main conjecture were discovered by Venjakob, and were then systematically developed in the subsequent papers by Coates-Fukaya-Kato-Sujatha-Venjakob and Fukaya-Kato. There was also parallel related work in this direction by Burns and Flach on the equivariant Tamagawa number conjecture. Subsequently, Kato discovered an important idea for studying the K_1 groups of non-abelian Iwasawa algebras in terms of the K_1 groups of the abelian quotients of these Iwasawa algebras. Kakde's proof is a beautiful development of these ideas of Kato, combined with an idea of Burns, and essentially reduces the study of the non-abelian main conjectures to abelian ones. The approach of Ritter and Weiss is more classical, and partly inspired by techniques of Frohlich and Taylor. Since many of the ideas in this book should eventually be applicable to other motives, one of its major aims is to provide a self-contained exposition of some of the main general themes underlying these developments. The present volume will be a valuable resource for researchers working in both Iwasawa theory and the theory of automorphic forms.

The algebraic techniques developed by Kakde will almost certainly lead eventually to major progress in the study of congruences between automorphic forms and the main conjectures of non-commutative Iwasawa theory for many motives. Non-commutative Iwasawa theory has emerged dramatically over the last decade, culminating in the recent proof of the non-commutative main conjecture for the Tate motive over a totally real p-adic Lie extension of a number field, independently by Ritter and Weiss on the one hand, and Kakde on the other. The initial ideas for giving a precise formulation of the non-commutative main conjecture were discovered by Venjakob, and were then systematically developed in the subsequent papers by Coates-Fukaya-Kato-Sujatha-Venjakob and Fukaya-Kato. There was also parallel related work in this direction by Burns and Flach on the equivariant Tamagawa number conjecture. Subsequently, Kato discovered an important idea for studying the K_1 groups of non-abelian Iwasawa algebras in terms of the K_1 groups of the abelian quotients of these Iwasawa algebras. Kakde's proof is a beautiful development of these ideas of Kato, combined with an idea of Burns, and essentially reduces the study of the non-abelian main conjectures to abelian ones. The approach of Ritter and Weiss is more classical, and partly inspired by techniques of Frohlich and Taylor. Since many of the ideas in this book should eventually be applicable to other motives, one of its major aims is to provide a self-contained exposition of some of the main general themes underlying these developments. The present volume will be a valuable resource for researchers working in both Iwasawa theory and the theory of automorphic forms.

Celebrating one of the leading figures in contemporary number theory – John H. Coates – on the occasion of his 70th birthday, this collection of contributions covers a range of topics in number theory, concentrating on the arithmetic of elliptic curves, modular forms, and Galois representations. Several of the contributions in this volume were presented at the conference Elliptic Curves, Modular Forms and Iwasawa Theory, held in honour of the 70th birthday of John Coates in Cambridge, March 25-27, 2015. The main unifying theme is Iwasawa theory, a field that John Coates himself has done much to create. This collection is indispensable reading for researchers in Iwasawa theory, and is interesting and valuable for those in many related fields.

The aim of this book is to give a systematic exposition of results in some important cases where p-adic families and p-adic L-functions are studied. We first look at p-adic families in the following cases: general linear groups, symplectic groups and definite unitary groups. We also look at applications of this theory to modularity lifting problems. We finally consider p-adic L-functions for GL(2), the p-adic adjoint L-functions and some cases of higher GL(n).

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 is the fifth conference in a bi-annual series, following conferences in Besancon, Limoges, Irsee and Toronto. The meeting aims to bring together different strands of research in and closely related to the area of Iwasawa theory. During the week before the conference in a kind of summer school a series of preparatory lectures for young mathematicians was provided as an introduction to Iwasawa theory. Iwasawa theory is a modern and powerful branch of number theory and can be traced back to the Japanese mathematician Kenkichi Iwasawa, who introduced the systematic study of Z_p-extensions and p-adic L-functions, concentrating on the case of ideal class groups. Later this would be generalized to elliptic curves. Over the last few decades considerable progress has been made in automorphic Iwasawa theory, e.g. the proof of the Main Conjecture for GL(2) by Kato and Skinner & Urban. Techniques such as Hida’s theory of p-adic modular forms and big Galois representations play a crucial part. Also a noncommutative Iwasawa theory of arbitrary p-adic Lie extensions has been developed. This volume aims to present a snapshot of the state of art of Iwasawa theory as of 2012. In particular it offers an introduction to Iwasawa theory (based on a preparatory course by Chris Wuthrich) and a survey of the proof of Skinner & Urban (based on a lecture course by Xin Wan).

This is a collection of papers on number theory which evolved out of the workshop WIN-Women In Numbers, held November 2-7, 2008. It includes articles showcasing outcomes from collaborative research initiated during the workshop as well as survey papers aimed at introducing graduate students and recent PhDs to important research topics in number theory.