Ring and Field Theory

This book is intended as a textbook for a one-term senior undergraduate (or graduate) course in Ring and Field Theory, or Galois theory. The book is ready for an instructor to pick up to teach without making any preparations.

The book is written in a way that is easy to understand, simple and concise with simple historic remarks to show the beauty of algebraic results and algebraic methods. The book contains 240 carefully selected exercise questions of varying difficulty which will allow students to practice their own computational and proof-writing skills. Sample solutions to some exercise questions are provided, from which students can learn to approach and write their own solutions and proofs. Besides standard ones, some of the exercises are new and very interesting. The book contains several simple-to-use irreducibility criteria for rational polynomials which are not in any such textbook.

This book can also serve as a reference for professional mathematicians. In particular, it will be a nice book for PhD students to prepare their qualification exams.