Overview
MATH5706 is an honours and postgraduate coursework mathematics course.
Units of credit: 6
Exclusions: MATH3711 (MATH3711 jointly taught with MATH5706)
Cycle of offering: Term 1
Graduate attributes: The course will enhance your research, inquiry and analytical thinking abilities.
More information: The Course outline will be made available closer to the start of term - please visit this website: www.unsw.edu.au/course-outlines, opens in a new window
The course outline contains information about course objectives, assessment, course materials and the syllabus.
Important additional information as of 2023
UNSW Plagiarism Policy
The University requires all students to be aware of its policy on plagiarism.
For courses convened by the School of Mathematics and Statistics no assistance using generative AI software is allowed unless specifically referred to in the individual assessment tasks.
If its use is detected in the no assistance case, it will be regarded as serious academic misconduct and subject to the standard penalties, which may include 00FL, suspension and exclusion.
The online handbook entry, opens in a new window contains information about the course.
If you are currently enrolled in MATH5706, you can log into UNSW Moodle, opens in a new window for this course.
Course overview
This course introduces the basic language and ideas of modern algebra, the two main concepts being that of a group and that of a ring. Groups are the vehicle through which mathematicians study symmetry. The data used to define them involves one algebraic operation, group multiplication. Rings, on the other hand, have two algebraic operations, addition and multiplication, much as you find with ordinary numbers. Historically, solving polynomial equations was a major driving force for the development of group theory, while number theory was the major driving force for ring theory. In particular, we will look at the role rings played in attempts to prove Fermat's last theorem in the 19th century and to study groups through representation theory in the early 20th century.