These notes form the contents of a Nachdiplomvorlesung given at the
Forschungs- institut fur Mathematik of the Eidgenossische Technische
Hochschule, Zurich from November, 1984 to February, 1985. Prof. K.
Chandrasekharan and Prof. Jurgen Moser have encouraged me to write them
up for inclusion in the series, published by Birkhiiuser, of notes of
these courses at the ETH. Dr. Albert Stadler produced detailed notes of
the first part of this course, and very intelligible class-room notes of
the rest. Without this work of Dr. Stadler, these notes would not have
been written. While I have changed some things (such as the proof of the
Serre duality theorem, here done entirely in the spirit of Serre's
original paper), the present notes follow Dr. Stadler's fairly closely.
My original aim in giving the course was twofold. I wanted to present
the basic theorems about the Jacobian from Riemann's own point of view.
Given the Riemann-Roch theorem, if Riemann's methods are expressed in
modern language, they differ very little (if at all) from the work of
modern authors.