The four contributions collected in this volume deal with several advanced results in analytic number theory. Friedlander's paper contains some recent achievements of sieve theory leading to asymptotic formulae for the number of primes represented by suitable polynomials. Heath-Brown's lecture notes mainly deal with counting integer solutions to Diophantine equations, using among other tools several results from algebraic geometry and from the geometry of numbers. Iwaniec's paper gives a broad picture of the theory of Siegel's zeros and of exceptional characters of L-functions, and gives a new proof of Linnik's theorem on the least prime in an arithmetic progression. Kaczorowski's article presents an up-to-date survey of the axiomatic theory of L-functions introduced by Selberg, with a detailed exposition of several recent results.

The Riemann zeta function was introduced by L. Euler (1737) in connection with questions about the distribution of prime numbers. Later, B. Riemann (1859) derived deeper results about the prime numbers by considering the zeta function in the complex variable. The famous Riemann Hypothesis, asserting that all of the non-trivial zeros of zeta are on a critical line in the complex plane, is one of the most important unsolved problems in modern mathematics. The present book consists of two parts. The first part covers classical material about the zeros of the Riemann zeta function with applications to the distribution of prime numbers, including those made by Riemann himself, F. Carlson, and Hardy-Littlewood. The second part gives a complete presentation of Levinson's method for zeros on the critical line, which allows one to prove, in particular, that more than one-third of non-trivial zeros of zeta are on the critical line. This approach and some results concerning integrals of Dirichlet polynomials are new. There are also technical lemmas which can be useful in a broader context.