Number Theory In Progress Elementary And Analytic Number Theory

"This book is the first volume of a two-volume textbook for undergraduates and is indeed the crystallization of a course offered by the author at the California Institute of Technology to undergraduates without any previous knowledge of number theory. For this reason, the book starts with the most elementary properties of the natural integers. Nevertheless, the text succeeds in presenting an enormous amount of material in little more than 300 pages."-—MATHEMATICAL REVIEWS

Proceedings of the International Conference on Number Theory organized by the Stefan Banach International Mathematical Center in Honor of the 60th Birthday of Andrzej Schinzel, Zakopane, Poland, June 30-July 9, 1997.

This is a book about prime numbers, congruences, secret messages, and elliptic curves that you can read cover to cover. It grew out of undergr- uate courses that the author taught at Harvard, UC San Diego, and the University of Washington. The systematic study of number theory was initiated around 300B. C. when Euclid proved that there are in?nitely many prime numbers, and also cleverly deduced the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, which asserts that every positive integer factors uniquely as a product of primes. Over a thousand years later (around 972A. D. ) Arab mathematicians formulated the congruent number problem that asks for a way to decide whether or not a given positive integer n is the area of a right triangle, all three of whose sides are rational numbers. Then another thousand years later (in 1976), Di?e and Hellman introduced the ?rst ever public-key cryptosystem, which enabled two people to communicate secretely over a public communications channel with no predetermined secret; this invention and the ones that followed it revolutionized the world of digital communication. In the 1980s and 1990s, elliptic curves revolutionized number theory, providing striking new insights into the congruent number problem, primality testing, publ- key cryptography, attacks on public-key systems, and playing a central role in Andrew Wiles’ resolution of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Analytic Number Theory distinguishes itself by the variety of tools it uses to establish results. One of the primary attractions of this theory is its vast diversity of concepts and methods. The main goals of this book are to show the scope of the theory, both in classical and modern directions, and to exhibit its wealth and prospects, beautiful theorems, and powerful techniques. The book is written with graduate students in mind, and the authors nicely balance clarity, completeness, and generality. The exercises in each section serve dual purposes, some intended to improve readers' understanding of the subject and others providing additional information. Formal prerequisites for the major part of the book do not go beyond calculus, complex analysis, integration, and Fourier series and integrals. In later chapters automorphic forms become important, with much of the necessary information about them included in two survey chapters.

Aimed at a level between textbooks and the latest research monographs, this book is directed at researchers, teachers, and graduate students interested in number theory and its connections with other branches of science. Choosing to emphasize topics not sufficiently covered in the literature, the author has attempted to give as broad a picture as possible of the problems of analytic number theory.

This valuable book focuses on a collection of powerful methods of analysis that yield deep number-theoretical estimates. Particular attention is given to counting functions of prime numbers and multiplicative arithmetic functions. Both real variable (”elementary”) and complex variable (”analytic”) methods are employed. The reader is assumed to have knowledge of elementary number theory (abstract algebra will also do) and real and complex analysis. Specialized analytic techniques, including transform and Tauberian methods, are developed as needed.Comments and corrigenda for the book are found at www.math.uiuc.edu/~diamond/.