Explaining the number field-function field analogy There is a general circle of ideas according to which true statements about number fields should have analogues in function fields. As best I can tell, the fact that this seems to work is pretty mysterious. The only results I know directly relating the two come from logic, such as Ax-Kochen, and these are limited to first-order statements in restricted languages. But the analogy apparently goes well beyond such statements. Are there any theorems/conjectures/observations that would explain why the analogy is a good one? I am looking for statements that allow one to go directly from the function field case to the number field case or vice versa.
 A: I think your statement could usefully be sharpened in a couple of ways. 
Firstly, the state-of-the-art is that true statements for function fields are expected to have analogues for number fields. The outstanding example here is naturally the Riemann hypothesis. Where conjectures for number fields are present, the way of working is via the heuristic that the function field analogue may be sought, and then proved. This has been taken a long way for the Langlands philosophy, for example.
The other major point is that historically what came first was analogies between Riemann surface theory and number fields. Hilbert seems to have conjectured the main outlines of class field theory using complex curves and Jacobians as the source of inspiration. Certainly the prior Dedekind-Weber geometric view fed into that. Subsequently we get "global field" as a kind of middle term: curves over finite fields are a little closer to number fields than complex curves. The attitude of Weil's Basic Number Theory is to develop the parallelism to the point of a common vocabulary (which is now widely used). Global fields can be studied successfully using local compactness, would be a succinct summary. Pontryagin duality, for example, can take much of the strain, and this theory is of course of broader application than number theory.
Of course we don't yet know why this works.
