Friday, 23 May 2008

soft question - What should be offered in undergraduate mathematics that's currently not (or isn't usually)?

Personally, I think the answer to this question is largely going to depend on one's particularly interests (whether they lie in algebra, analysis, topology, or whatever). This can be seen from many of the previous posts.



That being said, I do think that more number theory would be a great addition to the undergraduate curriculum. Many students take an introductory number theory course (or skip it because they learned it all in high school) and then don't do any more. There are lots of great areas of number theory which don't require too much background. P-adics would be great (Gouvea even laments in his book that p-adics aren't taught earlier - so maybe such a course should use his book). One could teach a basic semester of algebraic number theory, or a course in elliptic curves (following Silverman and Tate, for example). Both of these require no more than a basic course in undergraduate algebra. You can probably find these courses at many top universities, but they usually aren't emphasized as much to undergraduates. The reason why I think that these would be good is because number theory is a particularly beautiful area of math, and by getting glimpses of modern number theory early on, students get to see how beautiful is the math that's ahead of them.
(Another possibility is to have a course on Ireland and Rosen's book A Classical Introduction to Modern Number Theory. Princeton had a junior seminar on this book, for example.)



I also think Riemann surfaces are a very beautiful topic which should be taught early on and aren't too complicated in their most basic form. For, you get to see the deep geometrical theory lying behind the $e^{2 i pi}=1$ and the ambiguity of complex square roots which you learned about when you were younger. It shows the student that there can be very deep ideas lying behind a simple observation, and it shows the beauty and deep understanding that modern mathematics can lead you to.

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