Classical Algebra

In the first part of this book, Chapters 1-15, we present a (fairly) modern version of Galois’s ideas in the same setting that he used, namely, the complex numbers. Later, from Chapter 16 onwards, we generalise the setting, but the complex numbers have the advantages of being familiar and concrete. By initially restricting ourselves to complex numbers, we can focus on the main ideas that Galois introduced, without getting too distracted by ‘abstract nonsense’.