Ideals, Varieties, and Algorithms

We wrote this book to introduce undergraduates to some interesting ideas in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra. Until recently, these topics involved a lot of abstract mathematics and were only taught in graduate school. But in the 1960's, Buchberger and Hironaka discovered new algorithms for manipulating systems of polynomial equations. Fueled by the development of computers fast enough to run these algorithms, the last two decades have seen a minor revolution in commutative algebra. Th