Rings, Fields, and Vector Spaces

This book is an attempt to communicate to undergraduate math­ ematics majors my enjoyment of abstract algebra. It grew out of a course offered at California State University, Northridge, in our teacher preparation program, titled Foundations of Algebra, that was intended to provide an advanced perspective on high-school mathe­ matics. When I first prepared to teach this course, I needed to select a set of topics to cover. The material that I selected would clearly have to have some bearing on sc