PURE MTH 7059 - Groups and Rings

The algebraic notions of groups and rings are of great interest in their own right, but knowledge and understanding of them is of benefit well beyond the realms of pure algebra. Areas of application include, for example, advanced number theory; cryptography; coding theory; differential, finite and algebraic geometry; algebraic topology; representation theory and harmonic analysis including Fourier series. The theory also has many practical applications including, for example, to the structure of molecules, crystallography and elementary particle physics. Topics covered are: (1) Groups, subgroups, cosets and normal subgroups, homomorphisms and factor groups, products of groups, finitely generated abelian groups, groups acting on sets and the Sylow theorems. (2) Rings, integral domains and fields, polynomials, ideals, factorization in integral domains and unique factorization domains.