# Preface

Possible topics announcement from Daniel

> The course will loosely follow Poonen's book on rational points, available here: <https://math.mit.edu/~poonen/papers/Qpoints.pdf>
> Planned topics include: the Hasse principle for quadratic forms, obstructions to the Hasse principle (i.e. the Brauer-Manin obstruction and beyond), finding rational points and some effective methods (e.g. Chabauty), as well as some conjectural aspects of rational points. I plan to cover topics in the second half of the semester which depend on student interest; i.e. if there's interest I can say some things about Faltings's proof of the Mordell conjecture.