Re: Heuristics for number theory?

in article <1113199301.672446.298590@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
stephen white <mildredtoede@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


|People say some of the stuff becomes more digestable when you look at
|it from some higher algebraic / complex analysis / analytic number
|theory viewpoint..... so why bother with an elementary number theory
|class at all? I feel I've gained virtually nothing from this class,
|and the problems have been more frustrating than all my other classes
|combined.

i guess that it's a matter of taste, but i have to strongly agree with
this. i'm not an expert in number theory, but i've found that looking
at number theory from some of these supposedly "higher" viewpoints (in
my case especially focusing on the galois-theory viewpoint and its
geometric interpretation) makes large parts of number theory
surprisingly easy to understand and beautiful, in contrast to the
overwhelming ugliness found in most "elementary" introductions to the
subject.

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[e-mail address jdolan@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

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