The series is aimed specifically at publishing peer reviewed reviews and contributions presented at workshops and conferences. Each volume is associated with a particular conference, symposium or workshop. These events cover various topics within pure and applied mathematics and provide up-to-date coverage of new developments, methods and applications.

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.

In his 1974 seminal paper 'Elliptic modules', V G Drinfeld introduced objects into the arithmetic geometry of global function fields which are nowadays known as 'Drinfeld Modules'. They have many beautiful analogies with elliptic curves and abelian varieties. They study of their moduli spaces leads amongst others to explicit class field theory, Jacquet-Langlands theory, and a proof of the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil conjecture for global function fields.This book constitutes a carefully written instructional course of 12 lectures on these subjects, including many recent novel insights and examples. The instructional part is complemented by research papers centering around class field theory, modular forms and Heegner points in the theory of global function fields.The book will be indispensable for everyone who wants a clear view of Drinfeld's original work, and wants to be informed about the present state of research in the theory of arithmetic geometry over function fields.

The workshop was set up in order to stimulate the interaction between (finite and algebraic) geometries and groups. Five areas of concentrated research were chosen on which attention would be focused, namely: diagram geometries and chamber systems with transitive automorphism groups, geometries viewed as incidence systems, properties of finite groups of Lie type, geometries related to finite simple groups, and algebraic groups. The list of talks (cf. page iii) illustrates how these subjects were represented during the workshop. The contributions to these proceedings mainly belong to the first three areas; therefore, (i) diagram geometries and chamber systems with transitive automorphism groups, (ii) geometries viewed as incidence systems, and (iii) properties of finite groups of Lie type occur as section titles. The fourth and final section of these proceedings has been named graphs and groups; besides some graph theory, this encapsules most of the work related to finite simple groups that does not (explicitly) deal with diagram geometry. A few more words about the content: (i). Diagram geometries and chamber systems with transitive automorphism groups. As a consequence of Tits' seminal work on the subject, all finite buildings are known. But usually, in a situation where groups are to be characterized by certain data concerning subgroups, a lot less is known than the full parabolic picture corresponding to the building.