In unpublished notes, Pila discussed some theory surrounding the modular function j and its derivatives. A focal point of these notes was the statement of two conjectures regarding j, j′ and j″: a Zilber–Pink-type statement incorporating j, j′ and j″, which was an extension of an apparently weaker conjecture of André–Oort type. In this paper, I first cover some background regarding j, j′ and j″, mostly covering the work already done by Pila. Then I use a seemingly novel adaptation of the o-minimal Pila–Zannier strategy to prove a weakened version of Pila's ‘Modular André–Oort with Derivatives’ conjecture. Under the assumption of a certain number-theoretic conjecture, the central theorem of the paper implies Pila's conjecture in full generality, as well as a more precise statement along the same lines.

Modular curves like X0(N) and X1(N) appear very frequently in arithmetic geometry. While their complex points are obtained as a quotient of the upper half plane by some subgroups of SL2(ℤ), they allow for a more arithmetic description as a solution to a moduli problem. We wish to give such a moduli description for two other modular curves, denoted here by Xnsp(p) and Xnsp+(p) associated to non-split Cartan subgroups and their normaliser in GL2(𝔽p). These modular curves appear for instance in Serre's problem of classifying all possible Galois structures of p-torsion points on elliptic curves over number fields. We give then a moduli-theoretic interpretation and a new proof of a result of Chen (Proc. London Math. Soc. (3) 77(1) (1998), 1–38; J. Algebra231(1) (2000), 414–448).

In a previous article, we proved that Shimura curves have no points rational over number fields under a certain assumption. In this article, we give another criterion of the nonexistence of rational points on Shimura curves and obtain new counterexamples to the Hasse principle for Shimura curves. We also prove that such counterexamples obtained from the above results are accounted for by the Manin obstruction.

We determine the Galois representations inside the $\ell$-adic cohomology of some quaternionic and related unitary Shimura varieties at ramified places. The main results generalize the previous works of Reimann and Kottwitz in this setting to arbitrary levels at $p$, and confirm the expected description of the cohomology due to Langlands and Kottwitz.

We determine the Galois representations inside the $\ell$-adic cohomology of some unitary Shimura varieties at split places where they admit uniformization by finite products of Drinfeld upper half spaces. Our main results confirm Langlands–Kottwitz’s description of the cohomology of Shimura varieties in new cases.

In this paper we compute and continue meromorphically to the whole complex plane the zeta function for twisted modular curves. The twist of the modular curve is done by a mod p representation of the absolute Galois group.

In this paper we study the reduction to characteristic $p$ of the Shimura variety associated to a unitary group which has signature $(n-1,1)$ at its real place. We describe the Newton polygon, the Ekedahl–Oort, and the final stratification. In addition we examine the moduli space of $p$-isogenies using a variant of the local model for Shimura varieties. We apply our results to obtain a proof of the Eichler–Shimura congruence relation for the case that $n$ is even.