The Large Sieve and its Applications: Arithmetic Geometry, Random Walks and Discrete Groups

Among the modern methods used to study prime numbers, the ‘sieve’ has been one of the most efficient. Originally conceived by Linnik in 1941, the ‘large sieve’ has developed extensively since the 1960s, with a recent realization that the underlying principles were capable of applications going well beyond prime number theory. This book develops a general form of sieve inequality, and describes its varied applications, including the study of families of zeta functions of algebraic curves ove...