About This Course

The main goal of this "course" is to give you a productive environment to study for the MA 553 Qualifying Exam twice per week. Before you go any further, please note that this course is all about whatever you feel is best for studying for the qual, so if you think that this structure will not be helpful then let me know and we can figure out something else. I've outlined the tentative plan that I believe will be the most helpful below.

For the first several weeks, we will spend Monday reviewing a specific topic and on Wednesday we will take a practice qualifying exam. By doing this you should see progression in your abilities as the summer goes on. Near the end of the summer we will take quals that were written by the two qual writers for this August's exam, Professors Shahidi and Wlodarczyk. I recommend not looking at the quals listed below because you will get the most out of our meeting that day by taking them blind.

Here is the tentative schedule for each week:

1. Monday: Group theory. Wednesday: Qual 1, Ulrich August 2009
2. Monday: More group theory, basic ring theory. Wednesday: Qual 2, Goldberg August 2011
3. Monday: UFDs, PIDs and Euclidean domains. Wednesday: Qual 3, Goins August 2008
4. Monday: Basic field theory. Wednesday: Qual 4, Ulrich August 2016
5. Monday: Galois theory 1. Wednesday: Qual 5, Goldberg January 2016
6. Monday: Galois theory 2. Wednesday: Qual 6, Wlodarczyk January 2015
7. Monday: Qual 7, Shahidi August 2010. Wednesday: Qual 8, Wlodarczyk January 2017.
8. Monday: Qual 9, Shahidi August 2015 . Wednesday: Qual 10, Wlodarczyk January 2018.

The Monday review session will consist of a large collection of old qualifying exam problems over a specific topic. Working and reviewing together will be strongly encouraged. Hints will be distributed after the first hour.

The Wednesday practice quals, for the first 6 weeks, will run similar to the Monday sessions except that you will be asked to work alone for the first hour.