The book is based on a course given by J.-P. Serre at the College de France in 1980 and 1981. Basic techniques in Diophantine geometry are covered, such as heights, the Mordell-Weil theorem, Siegel's and Baker's theorems, Hilbert's irreducibility theorem, and the large sieve. Included are applications to, for example, Mordell's conjecture, the construction of Galois extensions, and the classical class number 1 problem. Comprehensive bibliographical references."

Heegner points on both modular curves and elliptic curves over global fields of any characteristic form the topic of this research monograph. The Heegner module of an elliptic curve is an original concept introduced in this text. The computation of the cohomology of the Heegner module is the main technical result and is applied to prove the Tate conjecture for a class of elliptic surfaces over finite fields, this conjecture is equivalent to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for the corresponding elliptic curves over global fields.