Rings and Polynomials

Groups may allow for solvable equations, but we need more structure to even talk about polynomials. We call these structures rings.

This article is part 3 in the How to Discover Finite Fields While Bored in Class series. The image represents a finite commutative ring with five elements.

In the previous article, we established groups as the simplest algebraic structures with solvable equations and we showed that the five color group was isomorphic to the finite Abelian group of order five.

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