Students should try to keep up to date with study of their lectures, so as to be able to understand subsequent lectures. They are also urged to do as many problems as possible. By doing problems, students will soon discover their strong and weak points.
The lecture notes will contain enough explanations and examples to make the definitions, theorems and arguments clear. However some students will need further examples and explanations of certain points and I recommend they peruse books from the reading list below. Most of these books have lots of examples and develop the concepts in greater detail than we have time for in our short course of lectures.
Course Outline
The course is an introduction to algebraic number theory, especially quadratic and cyclotomic fields.
Past exams
Reference books
No textbook is recommended
There are many books in the PSE and Undergraduate Libraries which touch on the subject. Here are some useful ones:
Computer programs
The subject contains many interesting algorithms. Students can experiment with
an exact arithmetic computer program called CALC, written by the lecturer
and which implements some of the algorithms met in the course. CALC can be downloaded from the WWW.
Some Informative Number Theory Sites
KRM 16th July 2019