Basic Info
- Instructor:
- Scott Carnahan
- Class time:
- MWF, 11am-12pm
- Location:
- Building 2, room 102
- Office Hours:
- Monday 2-3pm
- Tuesday 1-2pm
- Wednesday 8-?pm
- You are encouraged to request appointments if these times are
inconvenient.
- Prerequisites:
- You should know what a group action is, and you should be reasonably
familiar with complex numbers (e.g., periodicity of the function
e2πix).
- Format:
- Most of the class time will be given to student presentations. Before
a talk is given, the speaker will come up with simple exercises for the
class to do in groups after the talks. I will help the speakers prepare
for this. I will also assign some short homework, but it will mostly
involve individually writing up the short exercises. Finally, the
institute requires a coherent mathematics paper of about 10 pages on a
subject related to the course. I have a list of topics to suggest.
Recommended Texts:
- Serre, A Course in Arithmetic
- This will be the basic reference for the class. We will follow
chapter VII until we run out of material. It is somewhat dense, so you
may want to draw on other sources for additional examples and motivation.
This is reasonably close to my favorite possible treatment, although there
are some anomalies, such as the unorthodox Bernoulli number
convention.
- Stein, Modular
Forms, A Computational Approach
- This book was published very recently. You can download a pdf, but
the author would like it if you bought a copy. It has substantially more
material than Serre, and gives you guidance for realizing explicit
examples on a computer.
- Apostol, Modular functions and Dirichlet series in number
theory
- I like the exposition a lot. The beginning of this class has a lot of
overlap with the material starting with chapter 2.
- Dolgachev, Lecture
Notes
- This may assume a little more geometry than you have seen, but
it has interesting exercises.
- Milne, Modular Functions
and Modular Forms
- The beginning seems to be roughly a permuted expansion of Serre.
- Koblitz, Introduction to elliptic curves and modular forms
- This is an interesting treatment of the subject, where all of the
structure is motivated by the congruent number problem. If you haven't
seen concrete arithmetic applications of elliptic curves, this is a good
place to look.
- Silverman, Advanced topics in the Arithmetic of Elliptic
Curves
- Only the first chapter is relevant to the class, but it's pretty
good.
- Ribet, Lecture
notes
- Shimura, Introduction to the arithmetic theory of automorphic
functions
- This is not an easy read, but can be a useful reference.
- Lang, Introduction to modular forms
- I haven't actually looked at this book, but some people like it.