8.5 and final review, due on December 7

Reading:
1. The proof of Theorem 8.33 was a bit confusing since it mentioned so many results that weren't from this section.

2. I really liked seeing the table of groups extended to 15.  It's interesting to see T show up in there; it's a group we have never heard of before.


Exam preparation:
I think that being familiar with lots of examples will help more than anything else for the test.  I expect to see some of the group classification theorems on the final, since we haven't been tested on those yet.  I need to go over those a few times to make sure I know what they say, especially since some of them aren't intuitive.

One thing that I've learned already is that group theory makes recognizing patterns much easier.  If we have an unknown group, then knowing so much about the groups we have classified makes it easier to identify what the unknown group is isomorphic to, which gives us a lot of information about its structure quickly.  Abstract algebra will also help with my future math classes, since I will be doing grad school in math.

8.2, due on December 2

1. It was difficult to follow the proof of Lemma 8.6.  Could we go over that proof in class?

2. The main result of this chapter was pretty interesting.  It definitely makes working with abelian groups a lot simpler; we can classify them very quickly instead of starting from scratch with each.