No label defined (Q4488098)

This is a very useful addition to the many books on number theory with applications, and it is meant to be accessible to anyone from the novice to the research scientist. Although being very well written in an informative way, the novice will require a certain amount of mathematical maturity in order to gain something useful. With the material being presented accurately and authoritatively, the book can also be used as a reference text for the more experienced reader, and it is probably most suitable for final year undergraduate mathematics students. There are only 6 chapters: 1.~Arithmetic of the Integers, 2.~Congruences, 3.~Primitive Roots, 4.~Quadratic Residues, 5.~Continued Fractions, 6.~Diophantine Equations. An unusual feature of the book is that each chapter ends with two sections containing more advanced material; the penultimate sections are devoted to the applications, especially to cryptography, while the last sections deal with the development of algebraic number theory. In applications, for example, Chapter~2 has material on factoring, and Chapter~3 has a section on primality testing and cryptography, and all the discussions are well motivated with examples. Algebraic number theory is developed via quadratic fields, also with applications in mind. For example, there is a thorough discussion on divisibility of ideals in Chapter 4, with a last section on applications to quadratic orders, while the section on the continued fraction algorithm given in Chapter~5 includes material on the representation of ideals, cycles of reduced ideals, and Lagrange's theorem on fundamental units and its relation to continued fractions. The book provides an excellent supplementary source of information for the reader, not least in the many biographical footnotes on the mathematicians involved in the subject matter, and there are also more than a thousand exercises and examples in the text. Besides various tables for results in computational number theory, the nine appendices cover material from set theory, which includes discussions on the axiom of choice and Zorn's Lemma, to the ABC conjecture.