muna 580: I might take Number Theory in college just for fun. Is this class easy? I mean, I was told about about this class by one of my teachers, and ever since then, I became interested in it. Is this class fun? Is it easy? Should I take it?
I sat in on a class presided over by a number theorist who had published some results years ago on large primes, modular functions and elliptic curves.
This was a very small class of 8 or so students, apparently all the university held at the time that were that interested in Number Theory. Oddly enough, at one end of the class was a graduate student about to get his Ph.D. in Number Theory, and at the other end was a Junior student who, as I found out, did not know that all odd squares are congruent to 1, Mod 8.
The prof did most of his talking to the doctoral candidate. He explained things very fast, skipped around a lot, and rarely made any effort to be understood. Half of the students dropped the course after a week or so.
The Junior was scared to death that he would flunk and did not have much of a clue what he was expected to know anyway, but he stuck it out. I got a book out of the library on large primes, which I knew the Prof was interested in, and the Junior decided that I should lend it to him, because otherwise he would surely funk the final, if there was one. (We had no tests all quarter.)
The final test was a paper the student was to turn in and carefully write so as to indicate that the student understood what he was writing--should the professor have any questions.
However, the Prof never bothered, to my knowledge, to grade, comment, or return any of these papers. I guess (?) the survivors all got an A, anyway.
As for the book on large primes, I never saw the student after the "final," and so I had nothing to return to the library. The cost of the book was listed at $50, but the librarian, who apparently admired people who read such books, told me to "Just forget it."
Was that course fun? Was it easy? I’ll let you decide.
