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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the three topics discussed in this book: Shimura varieties, hyperelliptic continued fractions and generalized Jacobians, and Faltings heights and L-functions. These topics were covered during the Alpbach Summerschool 2016, the celebration of the tenth session with outstanding speakers covering very different research areas in arithmetic and Diophantine geometry. The first course was given by Peter Scholze on local Shimura varieties and features recent results concerning the local Langlands conjecture. It considers the unpublished theorem which states that for each local Shimura datum, there exists a so-called local Shimura variety, which is a (pro-)rigid analytic space. The second course was given by Umberto Zannier and deals with a rather classical theme but from a modern point of view. His course is on hyperelliptic continued fractions and generalized Jacobians, using the classical Pell equation as the starting point. The third course was given by Shou-Wu Zhang and originates in the famous Chowla–Selberg formula, which was taken up by Gross and Zagier in 1984 to relate values of the L-function for elliptic curves with the height of Heegner points on the curves. Building on this work, X. Yuan, Shou-Wu Zhang, and Wei Zhang succeeded in proving the Gross–Zagier formula on Shimura curves and shortly later they verified the Colmez conjecture on average. In the course, Zhang presents new interesting aspects of the formula.

This chapter explores Shou-Wu Zhang's minicourse on Faltings heights and L-functions. It essentially consists of three parts. The first part discusses conjectures and results in the literature which give bounds, or formulae in terms of L-functions, for “Faltings heights.” The authors also mention various applications of such conjectures and results. The second part is devoted to the work of Yuan–Zhang in which they proved the averaged Colmez conjecture. Here, the authors detail the main ideas and concepts used in their proof. The third part focuses on the work of Yuan–Zhang in the function field world. Therein they compute special values of higher derivatives of certain automorphic L-functions in terms of self-intersection numbers of Drinfeld–Heegner cycles on the moduli stack of shtukas. The result of Yuan–Zhang might be viewed as a higher Gross–Zagier/Chowla–Selberg formula in the function field setting. The authors then motivate and explain the philosophy that Chowla–Selberg type formulae are special cases of Gross–Zagier type formulae coming from identities between geometric and analytic kernels.

The aim of this chapter is to motivate and describe some recent developments concerning the applications of random matrix theory to problems in number theory. The first section provides a brief and rather selective introduction to the theory of the Riemann zeta function, in particular to those parts needed to understand the connections with random matrix theory. The second section focuses on the value distribution of the zeta function on its critical line, specifically on recent progress in understanding the extreme value statistics gained through a conjectural link to log–correlated Gaussian random fields and the statistical mechanics of glasses. The third section outlines some number-theoretic problems that can be resolved in function fields using random matrix methods. In this latter case, random matrix theory provides the only route we currently have for calculating certain important arithmetic statistics rigorously and unconditionally.