scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1061641

Authors François Liret, Dominique Martinais

Publication date 17 September 1997

As indicated by Michel Zisman in his Préface of this book, the aim of this book is to give a pleasant presentation, easy-to-read, clear, rigorous, with examples and exercises. In their Introduction, the authors explain also that they wanted to give neat proofs, elementary and with algorithms. The plan of the book is: Chapter I: Mathematical language, Statements, Reasoning. Chapter II: Sets and mappings, Fundamental sets, Operations on sets, Mappings from a set to another, Finite sets. Chapter III: Complex numbers, Rules of computation, Conjugate and modulus of a complex number, Argument of a complex number, Application to trigonometry. Chapter IV: Matrices, Definitions and rules of computation, Elementary matrices, Use of elementary operations, Linear systems of equations. Chapter V: Determinant of a matrix, Definition, Properties of the determinant, Use of the determinant. Chapter VI: Vector spaces, Rules of computation, Vector subspace, Linear independence, Bases and dimension, Vector subspace of \(K^n\). Chapter VII: Linear mappings, Definitions and first properties, Linear mapping and vector subspace, Matrix of a linear mapping. Chapter VIII: Affine geometry, Points and vectors, Affine subspace, Coordinates and barycentre, Plane affine geometry, Space affine geometry, Affine maps. Chapter IX: Arithmetics, Divisibility, Greatest common divisor, Theorem of Bézout, Prime numbers, Congruences. Chapter X: Polynomials, Definitions and rules of computation, Greatest common divisor, Theorem of Bézout, Root of a polynomial, Irreducible polynomial. Chapter XI: Groups, Definitions and rules of computation, Subgroup, Morphism, The symmetric group. Chapter XII: Rings and fields, Definitions and rules of computation, Subring and subfield, The field of rational numbers. Each chapter terminates with a list of exercises (with some brief solutions and some hints). At the end of the book, there is a short appendix about the history of the mathematics introduced in this book. The text contains a lot of examples. The presentation is very concrete, elementary and far from the formal style of French textbooks of the sixties. Moreover, and this is quite important, the typographical presentation is very good, in this sense the book is also easy to read. I know that undergraduate students have a very good opinion on this book. To conclude, this is really a nice textbook, which can certainly be recommended as a support for lectures to first-year students in mathematics.

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