Friday, April 28, 2006

Which math book am I?

It's Friday, and odds are readers know what it means for this blog. By the way, I am posting my notes on TLA 2006 over at my main blog Find the first post for that here. If that is of interest, feel free to hop over. Now, back to this. I never thought there could be a quiz for something like this. I will confess that I am not a mathematically inclined person. Sure, I got a basic math literacy, but it is not my forte. To this day, it amuses me at times that I wanted to be an engineer when I started my undergraduate days. In this case, the test is spookily accurate in terms of what I do, which is teach in a way to make things accessible for others. At any rate, here is what I learned.




If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be Joe Harris's Algebraic Geometry: A First Course.



I am intended to introduce students to algebraic geometry; to give them a sense of the basic objects considered, the questions asked about them, and the sort of answers one can expect to obtain. I thus emphasize the classical roots of the subject. For readers interested in simply seeing what the subject is about, I avoid the more technical details better treated with the most recent methods. For readers interested in pursuing the subject further, I will provide a basis for understanding the developments of the last half century, which have put the subject on a radically new footing. Based on lectures given at Brown and Harvard Universities, I retain the informal style of the lectures and stresses examples throughout; the theory is developed as needed. My first part is concerned with introducing basic varieties and constructions; I describe, for example, affine and projective varieties, regular and rational maps, and particular classes of varieties such as determinantal varieties and algebraic groups. My second part discusses attributes of varieties, including dimension, smoothness, tangent spaces and cones, degree, and parameter and moduli spaces.



Which Springer GTM would you be?
The Springer GTM
Test





A hat tip to Mark Lindner who posted his result here.

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