In this course students will learn about Noetherian rings and modules, Hilbert basis theorem, Cayley-Hamilton theorem, integral dependence, Noether normalization, the Nullstellensatz, localization, primary decomposition, DVRs, filtrations, length, Artin rings, Hilbert polynomials, tensor products, and dimension theory.

This resource contains activity handouts, a rubric, a facilitation guide, and tex files. The material is meant to be used for those teaching a college algebra course. The activities are meant to provide a deeper understanding (than a traditional course offers) of some of the topics covered in a college algebra course. The activities are intended for group activities and options exist for use in a single class or multiple classes.

All of the mathematics required beyond basic calculus is developed “from scratch.” Moreover, the book generally alternates between “theory” and “applications”: one or two chapters on a particular set of purely mathematical concepts are followed by one or two chapters on algorithms and applications; the mathematics provides the theoretical underpinnings for the applications, while the applications both motivate and illustrate the mathematics. Of course, this dichotomy between theory and applications is not perfectly maintained: the chapters that focus mainly on applications include the development of some of the mathematics that is specific to a particular application, and very occasionally, some of the chapters that focus mainly on mathematics include a discussion of related algorithmic ideas as well.

The mathematical material covered includes the basics of number theory (including unique factorization, congruences, the distribution of primes, and quadratic reciprocity) and of abstract algebra (including groups, rings, fields, and vector spaces). It also includes an introduction to discrete probability theory—this material is needed to properly treat the topics of probabilistic algorithms and cryptographic applications. The treatment of all these topics is more or less standard, except that the text only deals with commutative structures (i.e., abelian groups and commutative rings with unity) — this is all that is really needed for the purposes of this text, and the theory of these structures is much simpler and more transparent than that of more general, non-commutative structures.

Sal discusses the conditions of matrix dimensions for which addition or multiplication are defined. Created by Sal Khan.

This 10-minute video lesson provides an introduction to 2nd order, linear, homogeneous differential equations with constant coefficients. [Differential Equations playlist: Lesson 13 of 45]

This 8-minute video lesson continues the discussion from the previous video and shows how to find the general solution. [Differential Equations playlist: Lesson 14 of 45]

This 6-minute video lesson continues the discussion from the previous videos and introduces some initial conditions to solve for the particular solution. [Differential Equations playlist: Lesson 15 of 45]

This 9-minute video lesson continues the discussion from the previous videos and provides another example using initial conditions. [Differential Equations playlist: Lesson 16 of 45]

This 10-minute video lesson looks at what happens when the characteristic equations has complex roots. [Differential Equations playlist: Lesson 17 of 45]