Class Field Towers

The following survey on class field towers evolved from the
introduction to my thesis. Its main purpose was to relate my
results to those of others, so these notes suffer from the
serious drawback that they concentrate on results that were
(and still are) important for *me*. Moreover, the presence
(or absence) of proofs only reflects my efforts to understand
a given topic and should not be correlated to the importance
of the discussed results.

After these warnings, here's the gzipped
Table of contents,
the survey itself,
some Tables of class field towers of imaginary quadratic number fields,
and the Bibliography.

Here's a pdf
version of the whole thing.

Please note that the tables have only been checked for
discriminants $d > -183$; for the other discriminants,
they are incomplete and most likely *do* contain errors,
but I'm not going to promise an update in the next few months.