Classical Algebra: Its Nature, Origins, and Uses

I actually had fun writing this book, and if number theory and geometry had equally uncomplicated “classical” histories, I’d write two more matching books exploring them. But they don’t, and I don’t have enough time left in my life to sort through them. What I wanted to say about this subject, I said in the book, so nothing remains except to put up links to the pages that need to be done over to remove misprints. There were three misprints and a small error, but one of the misprints infected the table of contents, so here are the five pages, as corrected:

Note added July 28, 2008: One reader has very kindly written to me to point out a further error, on p. 93. I shouldn’t have been explicit about the two values of the cubic resolvent I introduced there. The values I gave were wrong. The correct values are given on p. 117, but they are not really relevant to the discussion on p. 93. Hence the corrected page is given here without mentioning them:

Note added January 15, 2010: A reader named David Yates has sent me a further list of errata. Specifically, he says the following:

“p.96, typo, the equation for B in the Vandermonde matrix has the cubed sign 3 misprinted.

p.104 Question 9.3, the solution p.191 is incorrect as it stands, it would need alpha and alpha squared, the coefficients of a and b in the second equation on p.104 v = etc, to be reversed, and similarly in the third equation w = etc.

p.192 'To see why, not' - should be 'note'.”