World Scientific Publishing Company Drinfeld Modules, Modular Schemes And Applications: Proceedings of the Workshop - Workshop Alden-Biesen, 09 - 14 September 1996

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.