Again there are no shiny booklets, but a small booklet (about 100 pages) hold together from a ring binder. All postgraduate courses in maths (except M820) use a set book, i.e. a book which students have to purchase separatly in a book store, and so this booklet contains some further notes and additional exercises.

The contents of the box are:

• Course Notes (with 8 units)
• Solutions to Exercises
• Programme and Course News
• Study calendar (on A4 paper)
• Assignment Booklet
• Letter from course team chair
• TMA Form (only one; they changed this. Instead of sending all TMA Forms at the beginning they'll send a TMA Form with every returned TMA. Good idea!)
• M823 Index
• Specimen and solutions

As you might have noticed, there is no course handbook included, which I would be able to take into the exam. Fortunately the Programm and Course News says that I am allowed to take the set book in to the exam. :-)

The course is divided into 8 units, whereas nearly each unit consists of one chapter from the set book (Introduction to Analytic Number Theory from Tom M. Apostol):

• Unit 1: Historical Introduction and The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic
• Unit 2: Arithmetical Functions and Dirichlet Multiplication
• Unit 3: Averages of Arithmetical Functions
• Unit 4: Some Elementary Theorems on the Distribution of Prime Numbers
• Unit 5: Congruences
• Unit 6: Finite Abelian Groups and their Characters
• Unit 7: Dirichlet's Theorem on Primes in Arithmetical Progressions
• Unit 8: Quadratic Residues and the Quadratic Reciprocity Law

The book chapters 8, 10 - 14 are not covered in this course. Since the set book is also used in the course Analytic Number Theory II, I assume that the rest of the chapters will be covered in that subsequent course.

I already worked through the set book in October / November last year. It repeats some important facts from M381 the undergraduate number theory course, but also introduces new stuff, like the interconnectivity to group theory.

Then lets have a word about the assignments in this course. They've changed the assignment procedure from this year on. There are 4 TMAs in this course, but only the final TMA and the exam result will count towards the final course assessment. Also, I need to exceed at least 20% on at least two of the three earlier TMAs. Also, in TMA 4 we are asked to write a brief account (essay style) to show that we understood how the various results in number theory are interconnected.

By the way, on the course website also some units from M381 are downloadable, that is really nice for those who are new to the OU or did not study M381.

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