"This book is designed for prospective and practicing high school mathematics teachers but it can serve as a text for standard abstract algebra courses as well. The presentation is organized historically: the Babylonians introduced Pythagorean triples to teach the Phythagorean theorem; these were classified by Diophantus, and eventually this led Fermat to conjecture his Last Theorem. The text shows how much of modern algebra arose in attempts to prove this; it also shows how other important themes in algebra arouse from questions related to teaching"--P. [4] of cover. Source: OpenLibrary