Book Description

Book Description
Wilhelm Magnus was an extraordinarily creative mathematician whomade fundamental contributions to diverse areas, including grouptheory, geometry, and special functions. This book contains theproceedings of a conference held in May 1992 at PolytechnicUniversity to honor the memory of Magnus. The focus of the bookis on active areas of current research where Magnus' influencecan be seen. The papers range from expository articles to majornew research, bringing together seemingly diverse topics andproviding entry points to a variety of areas of mathematics. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (2)

Lots of groups, very few of "their graphs"
This elementary introduction to group theory is supposed to be unique in its use of graphs to represent groups (Cayley diagrams), which would be an interesting and fresh approach to teaching group theory. But no, the authors don't deliver what they promised. It's the same old group theory, with a few Cayley diagrams thrown in here and there. Of the few Cayley diagrams that actually appear, many are so very trivial that they just seem stupid (C_n, Z, etc.). In fact there are only two nontrivial Cayley diagrams in the whole book: the quaternion group and the icosahedral group (last page).

Superb introduction
Graphs are a superb tool for understanding groups and for some reason are not usually taught in the usual introduction to group theory.This book is strictly an elementary introduction to group theory, but I believe it is the best introduction around.If you don't know any group theory and want to get into it, start here.If you know some group theory, but not about graphs of groups, then pick this book up. ... Read more