JSTOR All-Stars: "Galois Theory for Beginners"

July 9, 2007

The JSTOR database is an archive of important scholarly journals, offering researchers high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages. It now includes 37,094 articles from The American Mathematical Monthly, from 1894 to 2003. The 1994 article "Galois Theory for Beginners" by John Stillwell ranks as the fifth most frequently accessed Monthly article in the database.

"Galois Theory for Beginners"
John Stillwell
The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 101, No. 1 (January 1994), pp. 22-27

Galois theory is regarded as the peak of undergraduate algebra, and the modern syllabus is designed to lead to its summit, usually taken to be the unsolvability of the general quintic equation. The aim of this paper is to prove the unsolvability by radicals of the quintic using just the fundamentals of groups, rings, and fields from a standard first course in algebra.

The top four Monthly articles are:

  1. "College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage" by David Gale and Lloyd Shapley, Vol. 69, No. 1 (January, 1962), pp. 9-15.
  2. "Introduction to Fermat's Last Theorem" by David A. Cox, Vol. 101, No. 1 (January, 1994), pp. 3-14.
  3. "Period Three Implies Chaos" by Tien-Yien Li and James A Yorke, Vol. 82, No. 10 (December, 1975), pp. 985-992.
  4. "History of Mathematics Before the Seventeenth Century" by Raymond Clare Archibald, Vol. 56, No. 1 (January, 1949), pp. 7-34.

Access to the JSTOR archive is provided by many college, university, and other libraries. To find out if your library is a JSTOR participant, use one of the following links:
United States: http://www.jstor.org/about/participants_na.html.
Other countries: http://www.jstor.org/about/participants_intl.html.

If your library is not on one of the above lists, look for a nearby library that does have JSTOR access and is open to the public. Members of the MAA have the option of purchasing an individual subscription to JSTOR that gives them access to the archives of The American Mathematical Monthly, Mathematics Magazine, and The College Mathematics Journal.