This excellent textbook provides undergraduates with an accessible introduction to the basic concepts of abstract algebra and to the analysis of abstract algebraic systems. These systems, which consist of sets of elements, operations, and relations among the elements, and prescriptive axioms, are abstractions and generalizations of various models which evolved from efforts to explain or discuss physical phenomena.
In Chapter 1, the author discusses the essential ingredients of a mathematical system, and in the next four chapters covers the basic number systems, decompositions of integers, diophantine problems, and congruences. Chapters 6 through 9 examine groups, rings, domains, fields, polynomial rings, and quadratic domains.Chapters 10 through 13 cover modular systems, modules and vector spaces, linear transformations and matrices, and the elementary theory of matrices. The author, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh, includes many examples and, at the end of each chapter, a large number of problems of varying levels of difficulty.
