This book contains the refereed proceedings of the AMS-IMS-SIAM Joint Summer Research Conference on Recent Developments in the Inverse Galois Problem, held in July 1993 at the University of Washington, Seattle. A new review of Serre's Topics in Galois Theory serves as a starting point. The book describes the latest research on explicit presentation of the absolute Galois group of the rationals. Containing the first appearance of generalizations of modular curves, the book presents applications that demonstrate the full scope of the Inverse Galois Problem. In particular, the papers collected here show the ubiquity of the applications of the Inverse Galois Problem and its compelling significance. The book will serve as a guide to progress on the Inverse Galois Problem and as an aid in using this work in other areas of mathematics. This includes coding theory and other finite field applications. Group theory and a first course in algebraic curves are sufficient for understanding many papers in the volume. Graduate students will find this an excellent reference to current research, as it contains a list of problems appropriate for thesis material in arithmetic geometry, algebraic number theory, and group theory.

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the AMS-IMS-SIAM Joint Summer Research Conference on Recent Developments in the Inverse Galois Problem, held in July 1993 at the University of Washington, Seattle. A new review of Serre's Topics in Galois Theory serves as a starting point. The book describes the latest research on explicit presentation of the absolute Galois group of the rationals. Containing the first appearance of generalizations of modular curves, the book presents applications that demonstrate the full scope of the Inverse Galois Problem. In particular, the papers collected here show the ubiquity of the applications of the Inverse Galois Problem and its compelling significance. The book will serve as a guide to progress on the Inverse Galois Problem and as an aid in using this work in other areas of mathematics. This includes coding theory and other finite field applications. Group theory and a first course in algebraic curves are sufficient for understanding many papers in the volume. Graduate students will find this an excellent reference to current research, as it contains a list of problems appropriate for thesis material in arithmetic geometry, algebraic number theory, and group theory.

A consistent and near complete survey of the important progress made in the field over the last few years, with the main emphasis on the rigidity method and its applications. Among others, this monograph presents the most successful existence theorems known and construction methods for Galois extensions as well as solutions for embedding problems combined with a collection of the existing Galois realizations.

A consistent and near complete survey of the important progress made in the field over the last few years, with the main emphasis on the rigidity method and its applications. Among others, this monograph presents the most successful existence theorems known and construction methods for Galois extensions as well as solutions for embedding problems combined with a collection of the existing Galois realizations.

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.