No label defined (Q4044675)

This book is intended to serve as a basic text for an algebra course at the beginning graduate level. The book is rather well-planned, logical inter-connections of chapters and sections and suggested course outlines can be very helpful to the readers. The introduction contains prerequisites and preliminaries from logic and set theory, the main text consists of ten chapters: I. Groups; II. The structure of groups; III. Rings; IV. Modules; V. Fields and Galois theory; VI. The structure of fields; VII. Linear algebra; VIII. Commutative rings and modules; IX. The structure of rings; X. Categories. As it can be seen from this list of chapters, the contents of the book is traditional. The last chapter pays tribute to the current fashion, there are some arrows and diagrams appearing in the other chapters, however, as a whole the book is not overloaded with the jargon of the theory of categories. On the other hand, any true believer can easily encode the text into ``the language of categories''. The book is essentially self-contained and an average student may read it by himself. The subjects which the author considers he covers rather thoroughly, the statements are accompanied either with detailed proofs or with ``sketches of proofs'', the most elementary proofs are omitted: the reader should reconstruct them as an exercise. However, the great multiplicity and variety of theorems, propositions, lemmas, corollaries which the author put in the 502 pages of small pica is expressed with a pronounced pedagogical tact and clarity: the reader will not get lost in the book. The treatment of Galois theory in the book is based on that of I. Kaplansky. The Galois group and the basic connection between subgroups and subfields are defined in the context of an absolutely general pair of fields -- this permits easy generalization of various results to the infinite dimensional case. The algebraic and transcendental cases are distinguished in the theory of separable field extensions. The Sylow theorems for groups are accompanied with new lucid proofs suggested by R. J. Nunke. Each section of every chapter ends with a list of exercises -- a great many of them (825 exercises!) helps the student to master the material fully and appreciate it. The book would have certainly been one of the best manuals of algebra if it had been published fifteen or more years ago. However, nowadays it seems to be out-of-date. What is said in the book is said clearly and well and is read with intellectual pleasure. However, the title of the book is misleading for no really modern book on algebra can be considered even remotely complete and presenting an undistorted picture of algebra as it is, unless it contains chapters on lattices and semigroups. The present book lacks both chapters. It is patterned after the famous van der Waerden book but it disregards a major change which occurred after the revolution begun by van der Waerden. One cannot but agree with \textit{G. Birkhoff} [Am. Math. Mon. 80, 760--782 (1973; Zbl 0286.01013)] when he says: ``No longer do axioms and deductive systems, patterned after Euclid's Elements, seem so fundamental. Neither do groups or rings, with their subgroups, subrings and morphisms... Instead, the kinds of algebraic structures ... which are most relevant to digital computers and combinatorics are loops, monoids and lattices (or groupoids, semigroups and semilattices), which were largely ignored by most algebraists in 1930--1960''. Some elementary concepts of universal algebra (algebras, subalgebras, homomorphisms etc.) which ought to be introduced in such kind of book have been omitted. As a result, the author defines separately homomorphisms of groups, homomorphisms of rings, homomorphisms of modules, isomorphisms thereof, subgroups, subrings, submodules etc. Nevertheless, as it has been already said, the book is a really good and worthy introduction to some of the important chapters of modern algebra.