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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4037 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 10, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I was wondering if anyone can recommend a good abstract algebra book? It’s something I have been wanting to learn a bit of. I am a geophysicist so I have pretty strong linear algebra, calculus and general numerical

Methods background, but have never taken set theory or real/imaginary analysis.

I remember liking a course I took ages ago that was based on Atiyah-McDonald's Introduction to Commutative Algebra, though padded with additional material by the lecturer to remove the "commutative" qualifier.

The doorstopper that is Lang's Algebra has everything, but I thought it to be more useful as a reference work than something you'd actually read cover to cover.

When I took an abstract algebra course in college, the text we used was A Book of Abstract Algebra, 2nd ed by Charles C. Pinter. Decent book as I recall.

Ain't nothing wrong with Dummit and Foote, but as usual you pay through the nose. (I'm too cheap to own D+F, but it was the text in grad school. Ash is 1/4 the price, and has some cool algorithmic style stuff.)

With some texts, you can still just google "$Title $Author pdf" (or epub) and get a clean copy without torrenting. This is the case with what you just mentioned.

Probably trying libgen makes more sense. Awful lot of stuff over there..

Probably trying libgen makes more sense. Awful lot of stuff over there..

Archive.org works too, not only for public domain works.

Books still in copyright can be "borrowed" for limited time, easily downloaded and very easily stripped from DRM protection.

Dang that is expensive (even the international edition is like 60$!). I’ll start with Ash!

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