A Text-Book of Algebra

Abstract

THIS work is, as we are told in the preface, “the outcome of lectures delivered in the College of Physical Science at Newcastle-upon-Tyne.” It discusses, more fully than is usual in books on algebra, the fundamental principles of the science, and its aim is to be of service to the independent student who has not the advantage of “access to large libraries, or intercourse with other mathematical scholars.” The object of the author, as might be expected from his eminence as a mathematician and his experience as a teacher, is, in our judgment, likely to be successfully attained in the use of his work. The book is hardly adapted for those students whose object it is to attain such skill and facility in algebraical work as is necessary to face an examination paper in algebra, set by the University examiner of the present day. The examples, though sufficient for illustrating the principles, are not numerous enough for the purpose of developing such skill, nor selected with that special object; and such aids to the attainment of exactness as the various tentative methods of finding the factors of algebraical expressions of different forms, and other aids to insight into their constitution, are only incidentally alluded to. Still, even this class of students will find it a book worthy of reference, when they are revising the fundamental principles on which the science is based, and realizing that all its operations are reducible to a few fundamental laws.

A Text-book of Algebra.

By W. Steadman Aldis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887.)