I have been reading
A Course in Group Theory by John F. Humphreys. This is an excellent book, with concepts clearly laid out and explained, and with lots of worked examples to help the reader get a feel for the subject. I would heartily recommend it to anyone wishing to take up a course in group theory.
At the end of the book, there are a series of chapters guiding the reader into the classification of finite simple groups. This is of course too vast an area for any single book to deal with, but the author skilfully introduces the reader to all the ingredients that go into the development of this fascinating area of group theory and supplies a detailed bibliography for the interested reader’s further reading. The journey starts with the simplest finite simple groups, namely the cyclic groups of prime order and the alternating groups of degree
The reader is then introduced to the projective special linear groups (with the group
where
explicitly proved to be simple), the Mathieu groups (with the group
constructed directly from
and explicitly proved to be simple), and on to the other classical finite simple groups, namely the unitary groups, the symplectic groups and the orthogonal groups. The final section deals with groups of Lie type and the sporadic groups – concluding with the observation that the last finite simple group to be discovered was one called “the Monster”, which was found in 1981 and has a staggering
elements!
I am also reading
A Course in Number Theory by H.E. Rose and
Introduction to Metric and Topological Spaces by W.A. Sutherland. All three books are published by Oxford University Press. And the non-math books I’ve read this year include four novels by Isaac Asimov and one by Agatha Christie.
Read any good books recently? 
Linear Mode
