Child's Conception of Number

This book gathers original research papers and survey articles presented at the “International Conference on Class Groups of Number Fields and Related Topics,” held at Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad, India, on September 4–7, 2017. It discusses the fundamental research problems that arise in the study of class groups of number fields and introduces new techniques and tools to study these problems. Topics in this book include class groups and class numbers of number fields, units, the Kummer–Vandiver conjecture, class number one problem, Diophantine equations, Thue equations, continued fractions, Euclidean number fields, heights, rational torsion points on elliptic curves, cyclotomic numbers, Jacobi sums, and Dedekind zeta values.

In the early modern period, a crucial transformation occurred in the classical conception of number and magnitude. Traditionally, numbers were merely collections of discrete units that measured some multiple. Magnitude, on the other hand, was usually described as being continuous, or being divisible into parts that are infinitely divisible. This traditional idea of discrete number versus continuous magnitude was challenged in the early modern period in several ways.

This book is an attempt to describe the gradual development of the major schools of research on number theory in South India, Punjab, Mumbai, Bengal, and Bihar—including the establishment of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, a landmark event in the history of research of number theory in India.

This book is intended to complement my Elements oi Algebra, and it is similarly motivated by the problem of solving polynomial equations. However, it is independent of the algebra book, and probably easier. In Elements oi Algebra we sought solution by radicals, and this led to the concepts of fields and groups and their fusion in the celebrated theory of Galois. In the present book we seek integer solutions, and this leads to the concepts of rings and ideals which merge in the equally celebrated theory of ideals due to Kummer and Dedekind. Solving equations in integers is the central problem of number theory, so this book is truly a number theory book, with most of the results found in standard number theory courses. However, numbers are best understood through their algebraic structure, and the necessary algebraic concepts­ rings and ideals-have no better motivation than number theory. The first nontrivial examples of rings appear in the number theory of Euler and Gauss. The concept of ideal-today as routine in ring the­ ory as the concept of normal subgroup is in group theory-also emerged from number theory, and in quite heroic fashion. Faced with failure of unique prime factorization in the arithmetic of certain generalized "inte­ gers" , Kummer created in the 1840s a new kind of number to overcome the difficulty. He called them "ideal numbers" because he did not know exactly what they were, though he knew how they behaved.

This book is intended to complement my Elements oi Algebra, and it is similarly motivated by the problem of solving polynomial equations. However, it is independent of the algebra book, and probably easier. In Elements oi Algebra we sought solution by radicals, and this led to the concepts of fields and groups and their fusion in the celebrated theory of Galois. In the present book we seek integer solutions, and this leads to the concepts of rings and ideals which merge in the equally celebrated theory of ideals due to Kummer and Dedekind. Solving equations in integers is the central problem of number theory, so this book is truly a number theory book, with most of the results found in standard number theory courses. However, numbers are best understood through their algebraic structure, and the necessary algebraic concepts­ rings and ideals-have no better motivation than number theory. The first nontrivial examples of rings appear in the number theory of Euler and Gauss. The concept of ideal-today as routine in ring the­ ory as the concept of normal subgroup is in group theory-also emerged from number theory, and in quite heroic fashion. Faced with failure of unique prime factorization in the arithmetic of certain generalized "inte­ gers" , Kummer created in the 1840s a new kind of number to overcome the difficulty. He called them "ideal numbers" because he did not know exactly what they were, though he knew how they behaved.

This book gathers original research papers and survey articles presented at the “International Conference on Class Groups of Number Fields and Related Topics,” held at Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad, India, on September 4–7, 2017. It discusses the fundamental research problems that arise in the study of class groups of number fields and introduces new techniques and tools to study these problems. Topics in this book include class groups and class numbers of number fields, units, the Kummer–Vandiver conjecture, class number one problem, Diophantine equations, Thue equations, continued fractions, Euclidean number fields, heights, rational torsion points on elliptic curves, cyclotomic numbers, Jacobi sums, and Dedekind zeta values.

Owing to the developments and applications of computer science, ma­ thematicians began to take a serious interest in the applications of number theory to numerical analysis about twenty years ago. The progress achieved has been both important practically as well as satisfactory from the theoretical view point.