Masato Kurihara

This volume contains the notes originally made by Kenkichi Iwasawa in his own handwriting for his lecture course at Princeton University in 1964. These notes give a beautiful and completely detailed account of the adelic approach to Hecke’s L-functions attached to any number field, including the proof of analytic continuation, the functional equation of these L-functions, and the class number formula arising from the Dedekind zeta function for a general number field. This adelic approach was discovered independently by Iwasawa and Tate around 1950 and marked the beginning of the whole modern adelic approach to automorphic forms and L-series. While Tate’s thesis at Princeton in 1950 was finally published in 1967 in the volume Algebraic Number Theory, edited by Cassels and Frohlich, no detailed account of Iwasawa’s work has been published until now, and this volume is intended to fill the gap in the literature of one of the key areas of modern number theory. In the final chapter, Iwasawa elegantly explains some important classical results, such as the distribution of prime ideals and the class number formulae for cyclotomic fields.

This is the third of three related volumes on number theory. (The first two volumes were also published in the Iwanami Series in Modern Mathematics, as volumes 186 and 240.) The two main topics of this book are Iwasawa theory and modular forms. The presentation of the theory of modular forms starts with several beautiful relations discovered by Ramanujan and leads to a discussion of several important ingredients, including the zeta-regularized products, Kronecker's limit formula, and the Selberg trace formula. The presentation of Iwasawa theory focuses on the Iwasawa main conjecture, which establishes far-reaching relations between a $p$-adic analytic zeta function and a determinant defined from a Galois action on some ideal class groups. This book also contains a short exposition on the arithmetic of elliptic curves and the proof of Fermat's last theorem by Wiles. Together with the first two volumes, this book is a good resource for anyone learning or teaching modern algebraic number theory.