3.1 (first half), due Wednesday, January 18

The reading for today was the first half (through page 48) of section 3.1.

The most difficult part for me in this section was the part with the matrices and why they are rings. But upon carefully reading it, I was able to understand.

This was a very interesting section. I particularly liked the introduction to chapter 3. I was very interested to learn why this discipline is called abstract algebra. I thought that it was just because it was going to be very difficult. But, according to the book, it is called abstract because the "common core of essential features" is "abstracted" from different systems so that they can be more easily compared/examined. Very interesting!