Where can I find online copies of class field theory publications by Kronecker, Weber, Chevalley, Hasse, Hilbert, Takagi, etc?

First, there's no need to focus on online copies, as asked for in the question. We used to have things called libraries which contain journal articles in them. :) Try looking there.

More seriously, I think your task is to a large extent hopeless. Most of those works were never translated into English. But there are numerous English language sources which describe some aspect of how class field theory was originally developed and you should start there.

Here are some:

G. Frei, Heinrich Weber and the Emergence of Class Field Theory, in ``The History of Modern Mathematics, vol. 1: Ideas and their Reception,'' (J. McCleary and D. E. Rowe, ed.) Academic Press, Boston, 1989, 424--450.

H. Hasse, ``Class Field Theory,'' Lecture Notes # 11, Dept. Math. Univ. Laval, Quebec, 1973. [This is basically adapted from his paper in Cassels and Frohlich, but has some nuggets that were not in C&F.]

K. Iwasawa, On papers of Takagi in Number Theory, in ``Teiji Takagi Collected Papers,'' 2nd ed., Springer-Verlag, Tokyo, 1990, 342--351.

S. Iyanaga, ``The Theory of Numbers,'' North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1975. [The end of the book has a nice exposition of how alg. number theory developed up to class field theory.]

S. Iyanaga, On the life and works of Teiji Takagi, in ``Teiji Takagi Collected Papers,'' 2nd ed., Springer-Verlag, Tokyo, 1990, 354--371.

S. Iyanaga, Travaux de Claude Chevalley sur la th\'eorie du corps de classes: Introduction, Japan. J. Math. 1 (2006), 25--85. [Are you OK with French?]

M. Katsuya, The Establishment of the Takagi--Artin Class Field Theory, in ``The Intersection of History and Mathematics,'' (C. Sasaki, M. Sugiura, J. W. Dauben ed.), Birkhauser, Boston, 1995, 109--128.

T. Masahito, Three Aspects of the Theory of Complex Multiplication,
``The Intersection of History and Mathematics,'' (C. Sasaki, M. Sugiura, J. W. Dauben ed.), Birkhauser, Boston, 1995, 91--108.

K. Miyake, Teiji Takagi, Founder of the Japanese School of Modern Mathematics, Japan. J. Math. 2 (2007), 151--164.

P. Roquette, Class Field Theory in Characteristic $p$, its Origin and Development, in ``Class Field Theory -- its Centenary and Prospect,'' Math. Soc. Japan, Tokyo, 2001, 549--631.

H. Weyl, David Hilbert and His Mathematical Work, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. {\bf 50} (1944), 612--654. [Hilbert's obituary]

I did write up something myself about a year or so ago on the history of class field theory just to put in one place what I was able to cobble together from these kinds of sources. See

http://www.math.uconn.edu/~kconrad/blurbs/gradnumthy/cfthistory.pdf

which contains the above references as the bulk of the bibliography (I did not just type all those articles references above by hand!) The main thing which had baffled me at first was how they originally defined the local norm residue symbol at ramified primes. I give some examples of how this was determined in the original language of central simple algebras.


There is no reason to expect that any of these articles have been translated. As pointed out in comments and the linked threads there are some books that have been translated and some secondary sources in English. But for the articles themselves you'll have to read them in German. For my undergrad thesis I translated one of Artin's articles. You might want to try translating one article you want too.


As a starting point for online sources for those of us without a thing called library nearby I recommend Rehmann's list.

BTW I think that Furtwängler's name is missing from your list; he proved the existence and all the main properties of Hilbert class fields between 1902 and ca 1910.

Finally, the letters between Hasse and Artin, along with quite a lot of comments, are available here (as a free pdf file; unfortunately it is in German).