Algebra is one of the fundamental areas of mathematics and will almost certainly play an important role in whatever research area you choose to pursue during your time in graduate school. The goal of the Math 230 sequence is to provide a broad overview of algebra and to give you with a strong foundation that prepares you to pursue more advanced topics in the future. You will develop your algebraic intuition by working with many examples, solving lots of problems, and doing many proofs. Another key goal of this course is to prepare students for success on the Qualifying Exam in Algebra.
In 230B we will study modules and field theory. Besides lecturing we will also solve many problems throughout thec ourse, both exercises from Dummit and Foote and other sources, and also past qualifying exam problems from UCI and from similar exams at other institutions.
Pending the success of the trial we will have videos of lecture posted in Canvas (these will only be available for 2 weeks from I gather from the software).
I will post mandatory homework, which should be handed by everybody and which will cover the fundamental concepts will learn in the class and supplemental homework, with more challenging problems, that are meant to expand and enrich your knowledge about the subject.
Citing resources: With each week's homework, you must turn in a one-paragraph description of all the resources you used on that homework. This paragraph must mention anyone (student, professor, roommate, anyone) that you talked with about the problems, as well as any book or online resource (website, PDF, Facebook post, email that helped in your solution. Here is a sample paragraph:
On this week's homework, I worked collaboratively with Jane Smith, Hugh Jones, and Nathan Thompson on basically all of the problems. We used a technique that we learned from a an online forum (mathstack for example). We checked our answers against an online solution key we found at this webpage: ..... We also got really stuck on Problem 3, and so we used the solution in that answer key as the basis for solving Problem 5.
Writing such a paragraph is a required part of each week's homework, and it will be worth 10% of the grade on the homework. Even if you work on the problems entirely on your own and your only resource is the book, you are required to write this paragraph, in which case it might read something like:
On this week's homework, I did not work with any other students. I relied entirely on course notes and Dummit and Foote.
Moreover, while it will be acceptable to use any and all resources that you would like in writing up your homework solutions, failure to include this paragraph will result in a reduced grade (even the first time it happens!). Repeated failure to honestly cite the resources that you use will be considered an instance of academic dishonesty.
The grade breakdown is the following:
The pacing for sections in Dummit and Foote will be roughly the following: