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A Course in Arithmetic, by J.-P. Serre

(Springer-Verlag Graduate Texts in Mathematics 7)

Stephen Miller

I would like to have a seminar which meets a few times in August to go over the first few chapters of Serre’s classic text. During my graduate Number Theory course this year I plan to cover the material in the last two chapters (zeta functions and modular forms). The more-algebraic material in the first part of the book serves as a nice background to the course as well as to number theory in general. The main topics will be

• p-adic numbers and adeles
• quadratic reciprocity, Jacobi-Kronecker-Legendre symbols
• representations of integers by quadratic forms

The organizational meeting will be on Thursday Aug. 3 at Noon.