Caveat Lector
Before we start doing math together, we ought to confront a lamentable
fact:
Computers wouldn’t exist without mathematicians, but the web is not yet a
friendly place to display mathematical text.
There are a number of methods available for displaying mathematics, a
2-dimensional language with a large character set, on the web, but all
have significant drawbacks. A reasonable place to start looking for the
least objectionable solution is probably the World Wide Web Consortium’s MathML page, though MathML is still a
work in progress, and even at completion it is not intended to permit
display of advanced math. It’s a sad situation.
For want of a better method, the mathematical text at this site has been
created using MathType and Apple’s
never-to-be-sufficiently-praised ClarisWorks. The resulting html still
takes significant hand-tweaking, though. The pages are designed to
look best if viewed with a white background on a browser using 12 point
Times type. They will not look very good viewed this way, but they will
look even worse if you make other choices. I’m sorry about this, but
somehow a tiny minority of folks interested in cartoons and commerce seem
for the moment to have wrested control of the web from the right-thinking
mathematical majority.
Now that we’ve got that warning out of the way, you can either go on to analytic number theory, or back to school.