New open access book published: Module theory: an approach to linear algebra
Earlier this week we published an open access book via the repository –
Module theory: an approach to linear algebra. The book is authored by Emeritus Professor Thomas Blyth. Professor Blyth started at the University of St Andrews back in 1963 when he was appointed to the position of Lecturer in the School of Mathematics. He was later elected to the prestigious Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1974, and was promoted to the position of Professor in 1977. He was Dean of the Faculty of Science from 1994 to 1998, and retired in 2003 after 40 years of service at the University. Professor Blyth’s research mainly concerns the following research areas: residuated mappings, algebraic and ordered semigroups, and Ockham algebras, and over the course of his career published over 130 journal articles, as well as several books. His book,
Module Theory was published in 1977 by Oxford University Press, with a second edition released in 1990. The electronic edition which we have just published is a revised version of the 1990 second edition that has been reformatted to take advantage of the digital format. The book is also now published for the first time with a
Creative Commons CC BY licence, this allows users to reuse the content in a variety of ways. We asked Professor Blyth to tell us a little more about the book and why he decided to create this electronic edition:
“The first edition of Module Theory was published by OUP in 1977. It was translated (without permission) into Chinese in 1987, and I may have the only copy of this in the West. A second and enlarged edition was published by OUP in 1990. Although this has been out of print for several years now, I still receive many requests for it to be made available. So I prepared an electronic edition. Since OUP was not able to accommodate this for reasons of ‘file type issues’, I then took the decision to make it permanently available for free on the internet. An unusual decision perhaps, for a money-conscious Scot; but, as the saying goes: ‘old deans never die, they just lose their faculties'”
You can access the full book via the University Repository: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/12643
And if you’d prefer to access the 1st and 2nd editions in hard copy, they can be accessed at the University Main Library – here are the SAULCAT records.
