Böcker i Readings in Mathematics-serien

The famous problems of squaring the circle, doubling the cube and trisecting an angle captured the imagination of both professional and amateur mathematicians for over two thousand years. Despite the enormous effort and ingenious attempts by these men and women, the problems would not yield to purely geometrical methods. It was only the development. of abstract algebra in the nineteenth century which enabled mathematicians to arrive at the surprising conclusion that these constructions are not possible. In this book we develop enough abstract algebra to prove that these constructions are impossible. Our approach introduces all the relevant concepts about fields in a way which is more concrete than usual and which avoids the use of quotient structures (and even of the Euclidean algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor of two polynomials). Having the geometrical questions as a specific goal provides motivation for the introduction of the algebraic concepts and we have found that students respond very favourably. We have used this text to teach second-year students at La Trobe University over a period of many years, each time refining the material in the light of student performance.

" Our goals, like those of the other books in the series, are to explain connections and common viewpoints between various mathematical areas, to emphasize the motivation for studying certain prob lem areas, and to present the historical development of our subject.

The authors' novel approach to some interesting mathematical concepts - not normally taught in other courses - places them in a historical and philosophical setting.

The primary goal of these lectures is to introduce a beginner to the finite dimensional representations of Lie groups and Lie algebras. This is not surprising: group actions are ubiquitous in 20th century mathematics, and where the object on which a group acts is not a vector space, we have learned to replace it by one that is {e.

The primary goal of these lectures is to introduce a beginner to the finite dimensional representations of Lie groups and Lie algebras. This is not surprising: group actions are ubiquitous in 20th century mathematics, and where the object on which a group acts is not a vector space, we have learned to replace it by one that is {e.

The purpose of this book is to revive some of the beautiful results obtained by various geometers of the 19th century, and to give its readers a taste of concrete algebraic geometry.

This informative and exhaustive study gives a problem-solving approach to the difficult subject of analytic number theory. The goal is to provide a rapid introduction to analytic methods and the ways in which they are used to study the distribution of prime numbers. The book also includes an introduction to p-adic analytic methods.