Number Theory (Dover Books on Mathematics)

This book is great for the price and if you can handle the terseness of a Dover book I would say it is great in general. The back of the book indicates it would be good for liberal arts majors. That is just crazy. However, you don't need much more than a solid foundation in mathematics through the Calculus of sequences and series. To get the most out of this book, you should do as many of the exercises as you can, even the ones without answers. Also, plan on supplementing the text with some online research. A general review of generating functions may be useful. Chapter 3 is a bit out of place and easy to lose patience with. Perhaps it can be read following Part 1. With that said, you can get a lot out of this book with regard to number theory (which arguably may not be generally useful).

I have a background in logic but absolutely none in elementary number theory or abstract algebra and I am using this as a first-time study guide. I find it very good. I have to mull over some of the proofs and examples since certain shortcuts are not immediately evident to me, but everything is generally clear and easy to follow. There are very few historical remarks which may or may not be a bonus for some. And as Dover does, they are practically giving this thing away.

The other reviews pretty much say it all. The book begins with a pedestrian approach to the topic and then gradually becomes more complex. Should be accessible to most readers.

George Andrews is the reigning expert on partitions in the mathematical community who has written many seminal papers on the subject over the past half-century! If you don't know what partitions are in the theoretical sense, don't worry, the text provides ample introduction. I don't think you can find a more elementary introduction to the difficult, but extraordinarily powerful and elegant theory of partitions. The book covers the basics of number theory well, but it is the chapters on partitions that make this text stand out. It covers the Rogers-Ramanujan identities as well as the Jacobi triple product identity. It is rare in the mathematical community that an expert in a subject also writes a ground-level introductory text - but that's what you have here. Thanks to the dover edition, it's now quite affordable.