Thursday, September 19, 2013

4.2-4.3 & 5.1, due on September 20

Difficult:
    The material is rather straightforward. I suppose that my only difficulty at this point is that I don't know where this is going. Transcendental numbers are cool, but what can you do with them, or why should I care about simple extensions?

Reflective:
    The concept of transcendental numbers is cool. Their existence isn't totally expected until you realize that there are only countably many polynomials of finite order over the rationals, as aleph-null squared is still aleph-null.
    I also didn't quite expect that simple extensions could be a composition of simple extensions, for example adjoining Q with i followed by sqrt(2) is the same as adjoining Q by i + sqrt(2).

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