Math 378
Number Theory
Instructor: Joshua Holden
Office: G207
Office Phone: 877-8320
E-mail: holden@rose-hulman.edu
Web Page: http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~holden
What are these pictures of?
What is the next number in each of the following sequences?
Computational Number Theory: 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, ...
Algebraic Number Theory: (hard) 1, 1, 2, 2, 4, 2, 6, 4, 6, 4,
...
Combinatorial Number Theory: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55,
...
Analytic Number Theory: 3, 5, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 29, 31 ...
Arithmetic Geometry: 3, 4, 5, 5, 12, 13, 7, 24, 25, 8, 15, 17,
...
Trick Question: 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, ...
Description
Number theory is the study of integers, that is, whole
numbers. Anything and everything about whole numbers.
And occasionally fractions. And square roots. And
other stuff. In fact, number theory touches on just about
every other area of mathematics, and we will try to explore as
many different aspects of number theory as we can.
One of the main goals in
this class is to have you (the student) perform as an active
learner. To do this you will need to do the exercises, raise
questions about structures that you are studying, create hypotheses,
and test these hypotheses.
Some of the topics covered include divisibility, congruences, prime
numbers, primality testing, factorization algorithms, RSA
encryption, solutions of equations in integers, quadratic residues,
reciprocity, generating functions, multiplicative and other
important functions of elementary number theory. There will be
a healthy amount of pure theory, but we will be talking about
algorithms as well, and also applications such as cryptography.
Requirements
Technically, the only prequisite for this course is the instructor's
consent. If you have had DISCO I (Math 275) you are just fine.
Otherwise you might want to discuss your background with me.
Textbook
There will be two required textbooks for this course; luckily they
are both fairly inexpensive. They will be:
Josh's home page.