Abelian varieties with complex multiplication (for pedestrians)

Abstract

This is the text of an article that I wrote and disseminated in September 1981, except that I've updated the references, corrected a few misprints, and added a table of contents, some footnotes, and an addendum. The original article gave a simplified exposition of Deligne's extension of the Main Theorem of Complex Multiplication to all automorphisms of the complex numbers. The addendum discusses some additional topics in the theory of complex multiplication -- the origins of the theory, Hilbert's Twelfth Problem, why algebraic Hecke characters are motivic, and the periods of abelian varieties of CM-type. (43 pages)