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Primes of the Form x^2 + n y^2Book

by David A. Cox

Who uses, recommends or left Primes of the Form x^2 + n y^2, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Grant Sanderson
Mathematician and creator of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel and the Manim animation library.
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This might seem like a bizarrely specific question to write a whole book about, but that's actually the charm. It covers deep and general ideas, such as class field theory and elliptic functions, which are usually only taught to graduate students, but Cox approaches it all from an extremely concrete question which Fermat thought about.

His Book recommendations page, introduced as "a small list of textbooks I've thoroughly enjoyed at some time in the past, with the added condition that each one stands out in some way from the surrounding body of math texts". The cover images link to Amazon through amzn.to short links that resolve to URLs carrying the affiliate tag 3b1b04-20.

2020-06-01·3blue1brown.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.