The documents contained herein are all pdf files and require Adobe Acrobat (or something similar) to view them. Go back to the math department's course information page here for more information on how to obtain (for free!) Adobe Acrobat.
Barring some sort of catastrophy, I will be reading my email several times a day. Thus, this is an excellent way to communicate with me outside of the classroom. Please note, however, that I use text-only mail readers, so sending me email encoded in HTML is inconvenient for me to read and sending me stuff like Word documents as attachments is futile. Most email programs will prompt you whether to send mail in HTML or not. Please warn me before-hand if you must send me email with an attachment.
The textbook for the course is Number Fields by Daniel A. Marcus. We will attempt to cover as much of the material from the first seven chapters as is reasonable.
Grades for section 1 will be based on homework and the final exam. The weights for these are 70% and 30%, respectively.
Homework will be assigned somewhat irregularly; I will usually have one assignment per week. I'll announce assignments (and due dates) in class and also post them to this webpage. You are free to work with other students on the homework; in fact, this is encouraged. Sloppy and/or illegible work will be returned back with no credit! Your homework is something of which you should be proud (notice how I didn't end with a preposition there). Expect to spend lots of time on it.
This handout contains goodies such as the definition of order at a prime ideal and the Chinese Remainder Theorem. Good stuff.
I've written up a proof of Dedekind's theorem for your reading enjoyment. Homomorphisms, kernels, commutative diagrams -- the budding algebraist in you squeals with delight.
Since I didn't want to go into the gory details in class, I've typed up notes on the Minkowski constant which describes how one can show that each ideal class has a representative ideal with fairly small norm. And on a somewhat related note, here is a proof of a lemma dealing with units which is terribly handy.In class on 4/18 I mangled the proof for the convergence of the zeta function for a number field. I felt so bad that I typed up a much neater presentation.
Last update: April 20, 2006