p-adic approaches to rational points on curves (4)
By Bjorn Poonen
In these four lectures, I will describe Chabauty's p-adic method for determining the rational points on a curve whose Jacobian has rank less than the genus, hint at Kim's nonabelian generalization, and finally discuss the recent paper of Lawrence and Venkatesh that uses p-adic period maps to give a new proof of Faltings's theorem.