Fernando Q. Gouvêa Carter Professor and Chair Department of Mathematics and Statistics Colby College Waterville, ME 4901 Office phone number: 207-859-5836 Fax: 207-859-5846 Email: fqgouvea@colby.edu

I work in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Colby College. The links will take you to the department home page and the Colby home page. There's also an official professional profile page.

In the Spring of 2015 I am teaching History of Mathematics and Topics in Abstract Algebra. In the latter, we will be studying the theory of representations of finite groups.

My office hours this semester are:

• Mondays, 2:00–3:30
• Tuesdays, 1:00–3:00
• Fridays, 10:30–12:00

If you need to see me at a different time, please email me to make an appointment. Note that I am almost never on campus on Thursdays.

I am currently department chair. Alas!

I am the editor of the Mathematical Association of America's online book review service, MAA Reviews. This is the place to go for mathematics books: what's out there, is it any good, what's recommended for library acquisition.

We post new reviews to the main MAA Reviews page roughly once a week. Please visit! Tell all your friends!

I am also the editor of the MAA's Carus Mathematical Monographs. This was the MAA's first book series, slow publishing at its best. Help me find book number 32… or write it yourself!

Stuff for Colby Students

Sometimes I feel preachy. Here are my notes for majors.

Publications

My latest book is A Guide to Groups, Rings, and Fields. This is a survey of graduate algebra, aimed principally at those who want to review the subject. Aside from a couple of broadly introductory chapters, the book looks at groups, group actions, and group representation; rings and their modules; fields, skew fields, and Galois theory. There are no proofs, but I hope readers will find it a useful overview of the material. The link takes you to the main page for the book, where I also keep a list of currently-known errors and misprints.

First	Second	Expanded	Taiwan	Slovenia	Brazil

The Expanded Edition of Math through the Ages came out in January 2004. The original book was adopted as a textbook by many teachers and professors, and we got requests for suggestions of problems and other assignments. This edition, co-published by Oxton House and the Mathematical Association of America, aims to satisfy those requests. It's also prettier and in hardcover. This book was awarded the MAA's Beckenbach Book Prize at the January 2007 Joint Mathematics Meetings. An expanded version of the second edition is in the works.

The latest offshoot from Math through the Ages is two collections called Pathways from the Past. Each contains historically-based worksheets that teachers can use to teach mathematics. Each set of worksheets comes with a 64-page teacher's manual that provides historical background and some guidance on how to use this material in class.

There are two sets of worksheets. Pathways I focuses on Numbers, Numerals, and Arithmetic, while Pathways II is about Algebra. Both sets are available from Oxton House.

Math through the Ages has been translated into three other languages so far; you can see the covers of those editions above.

P-adic Numbers: the corrected third printing of the second edition of my book p-adic Numbers: An Introduction came out in mid-2003. The book is an introduction to p-adic numbers and p-adic analysis aimed at mathematics undergraduates. It tries to be open up the theory to the reader in a friendly and accessible way.

Check here for (a few) errata, notes, and other comments about the book. I'm hoping to produce a third edition in the next couple of years, so let me know if you have found any errors or have suggestions. One of the plans for the third edition is to include a little more on the history of the p-adic numbers, and maybe something on Witt vectors.

Arithmetic of p-adic Modular Forms was my first book, based on my PhD thesis. It is desperately out-of-date, since the field has progressed a lot since I wrote it in the late 1980s. In particular, nowadays one would want to approach the theory from Coleman's point of view.

I've written a lot of other stuff, of course. Here is the full list.

Material available on the web: This page lists some material I've written and which is available on the web.

Interests: My research interests are:

• History of Mathematics, especially the history of algebra and number theory, and
• Number Theory and Arithmetic Geometry, with a special focus on modular forms and Galois representations.