This book grew out of a course which I gave during the winter term 1997/98 at the Universitat Munster. The course covered the material which here is presented in the first three chapters. The fourth more advanced chapter was added to give the reader a rather complete tour through all the important aspects of the theory of locally convex vector spaces over nonarchimedean fields. There is one serious restriction, though, which seemed inevitable to me in the interest of a clear presentation. In its deeper aspects the theory depends very much on the field being spherically complete or not. To give a drastic example, if the field is not spherically complete then there exist nonzero locally convex vector spaces which do not have a single nonzero continuous linear form. Although much progress has been made to overcome this problem a really nice and complete theory which to a large extent is analogous to classical functional analysis can only exist over spherically complete field8. I therefore allowed myself to restrict to this case whenever a conceptual clarity resulted. Although I hope that thi8 text will also be useful to the experts as a reference my own motivation for giving that course and writing this book was different. I had the reader in mind who wants to use locally convex vector spaces in the applications and needs a text to quickly gra8p this theory.

This book grew out of a course which I gave during the winter term 1997/98 at the Universitat Munster. The course covered the material which here is presented in the first three chapters. The fourth more advanced chapter was added to give the reader a rather complete tour through all the important aspects of the theory of locally convex vector spaces over nonarchimedean fields. There is one serious restriction, though, which seemed inevitable to me in the interest of a clear presentation. In its deeper aspects the theory depends very much on the field being spherically complete or not. To give a drastic example, if the field is not spherically complete then there exist nonzero locally convex vector spaces which do not have a single nonzero continuous linear form. Although much progress has been made to overcome this problem a really nice and complete theory which to a large extent is analogous to classical functional analysis can only exist over spherically complete field8. I therefore allowed myself to restrict to this case whenever a conceptual clarity resulted. Although I hope that thi8 text will also be useful to the experts as a reference my own motivation for giving that course and writing this book was different. I had the reader in mind who wants to use locally convex vector spaces in the applications and needs a text to quickly gra8p this theory.

Non-Archimedean functional analysis, where alternative but equally valid number systems such as p-adic numbers are fundamental, is a fast-growing discipline widely used not just within pure mathematics, but also applied in other sciences, including physics, biology and chemistry. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive treatment of non-Archimedean locally convex spaces. The authors provide a clear exposition of the basic theory, together with complete proofs and new results from the latest research. A guide to the many illustrative examples provided, end-of-chapter notes and glossary of terms all make this book easily accessible to beginners at the graduate level, as well as specialists from a variety of disciplines.

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"Contains research articles by nearly 40 leading mathematicians from North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, presented at the Fourth International Conference on p-adic Functional Analysis held recently in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Includes numerous new open problems documented with extensive comments and references."

This book introduces value distribution theory over non-Archimedean fields, starting with a survey of two Nevanlinna-type main theorems and defect relations for meromorphic functions and holomorphic curves. Secondly, it gives applications of the above theory to, e.g., abc-conjecture, Waring's problem, uniqueness theorems for meromorphic functions, and Malmquist-type theorems for differential equations over non-Archimedean fields. Next, iteration theory of rational and entire functions over non-Archimedean fields and Schmidt's subspace theorems are studied. Finally, the book suggests some new problems for further research. Audience: This work will be of interest to graduate students working in complex or diophantine approximation as well as to researchers involved in the fields of analysis, complex function theory of one or several variables, and analytic spaces.