Today I discovered what has been for me the most exciting piece of mathematical news of the past several months*: Nathan Jacobson’s book Basic Algeba II is going back in print! It is being brought back to Dover Publications, the people who bring you the really inexpensive paperback textbooks. According to Amazon.com, Basic Algebra II will be published on July 17, 2009, and will list for $25.95.
I have wanted my own copy of BAII almost from the moment I first picked it up at the library, but the fact that the last edition in print was published in 1980, and the high cost of used copies kept me from ordering a copy over the internet. I thought I might have to wait for a senior mathematician to die or retire before I could get my hands on a copy. I already own a copy of Basic Algebra I, but, frankly, the content of that volume is not very interesting to me. Basic Algebra II, on the other hand, covers a lot of homological algebra and commutative ring theory (topics near and dear to my heart). Atiyah and MacDonald’s Introduction to Commutative Algebra is a nice little book, and it’s one of the primary references I used back when I was trying to learn commutative ring theory and algebraic geometry, but it doesn’t match the depth of BAII.
*More exciting than graduating with my PhD, but probably less exciting than when I figured out some details for my thesis back in February or March.
Tags: algebra
August 9, 2009 at 11:14 pm |
[...] talked before why I’m so excited to be ordering Jacobson’s book. As for Levenson’s book, I [...]