No label defined (Q4516135)

As its title suggests, the book describes Nevanlinna's value distribution theory of holomorphic and meromorphic functions, and describes the relation with diophantine problems observed by C. Osgood, S. Lang, and the reviewer. Each of the book's seven chapters is divided into Part A, describing some aspect of Nevanlinna theory, and Part B, describing the corresponding situation in number theory. In addition, each chapter gives at the end a table saying which theorem (or definition, etc.) in Nevanlinna theory corresponds to which theorem in number theory. The chapter topics are (1) Nevanlinna's classical First and Second Main Theorems, and Roth's theorem; (2) corresponding theorems for Riemann surfaces and algebraic curves; (3) approximations of hyperplanes in projective space (Cartan's theorem and Schmidt's Subspace Theorem); (4) moving-target problems; (5) equidimensional Nevanlinna theory; (6) results for subvarieties of abelian varieties; and (7) complex hyperbolicity. The theory extending the results of Chapter 6 to semiabelian varieties is not covered in this book. The book's primary emphasis is on Nevanlinna theory, in which essentially all of the theorems in the book are given complete proofs. In number theory, some theorems are given complete proofs (e.g., Roth's theorem and the Mordell-Weil theorem); others are stated without proof (e.g., Schmidt's Subspace Theorem and Faltings' theorem on the Mordell conjecture). Because of this, as well as the fact that many of the statements in the book are still unproved in the number field case, Part B is very short in several of the chapters. The book does not require much background. For example, the proof of the Mordell-Weil theorem includes a brief synopsis of the basic theory of elliptic curves, which in turn contains a short description of the basic facts about valuations. Later chapters assume a bit more background; for example, Chapter 6 assumes that the reader knows the basics on abelian varieties. Although it has no exercises, it would make an excellent textbook in the subject.