Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Mathematics, June 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

We discuss the deformation theory of non-commutative formal groups G in positive characteristic. Under a geometric assumption on G, we produce a commutative formal group H whose distribution bialgebra has a certain skewed Poisson structure. This structure gives first order deformation data which integrates to the distribution bialgebra of G.

Thesis (MSc)--University of Stellenbosch, 2008. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (MSc (Mathematics))--Stellenbosch University, 2008. / This is an exposition of the explicit approach to Local Class Field Theory due to J. Tate and J. Lubin. We mainly follow the treatment given in [15] and [25]. We start with an informal introduction to p-adic numbers. We then review the standard theory of valued elds and completion of those elds. The complete discrete valued elds with nite residue eld known as local elds are our main focus. Number theoretical aspects for local elds are considered. The standard facts about Hensel's lemma, Galois and rami cation theory for local elds are treated. This being done, we continue our discussion by introducing the key notion of relative Lubin-Tate formal groups and modules. The torsion part of a relative Lubin-Tate module is then used to generate a tower of totally rami ed abelian extensions of a local eld. Composing this tower with the maximal unrami ed extension gives the maximal abelian extension: this is the local Kronecker-Weber theorem. What remains then is to state and prove the theorems for explicit local class eld theory and end our discussion.