Fitting ideals in number theory and arithmetic (Q2232365)

This is a well-written survey article about Fitting ideals and their applications in number theory. The author gives a cross section over the course of many decades -- from the late 19th century till today. The emphasis, however, is on more recent developments. The definition of Fitting ideals is relatively easy to understand. Only the notion of the determinant of a linear map and some basic ring theory are required. Nevertheless, it provides a powerful tool to compute annihilators of a module. For this reason, Fitting ideals appear frequently in number theory as there are many conjectures of the type `an analytic object annihilates an arithmetic object'. In the article, this is illustrated by a famous conjecture of Brumer on the annihilation of class groups, the latter being one of the most central invariants attached to a number field. In the case of an abelian extension of the rationals, Brumer's conjecture is implied by Stickelberger's theorem from the late 19th century [\textit{L. Stickelberger}, Math. Ann. 37, 321--367 (1890; JFM 22.0100.01)]. The general case has recently been proven (away from its \(2\)-primary part) by \textit{S. Dasgupta} and \textit{M. Kakde} [``On the Brumer-Stark Conjecture'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:2010.00657}]. In fact, they showed that the analytic object (a so-called Stickelberger element) is contained in the Fitting ideal of (a dual of a variant of) the class group. The author first introduces Fitting ideals and then explains the case of abelian extension of \(\mathbb Q\) in some detail. This already includes a few more recent results. He then turns to more advanced techniques (cohomology, Iwasawa theory), but knows how to make things intelligible to the reader. At least the first four (or rather four and a half) of the five sections are very accessible to a broad readership. The last section (`Further developments') is a little more involved. The notion of Fitting ideal and the corresponding annihilation conjectures in number theory have meanwhile been generalised to not necessarily abelian extensions and hence not necessarily commutative rings by the reviewer. We refer the interested reader to the two survey articles [\textit{A. Nickel} and \textit{H. Johnston}, Adv. Stud. Pure Math. 86, 27--60 (2020; Zbl 1481.11108)] and [\textit{A. Nickel}, in: Spectral structures and topological methods in mathematics. Zürich: European Mathematical Society (EMS). 365--388 (2019; Zbl 1469.11427)].