As you can see I haven't posted anything here for six months and some of you may be wondering what has happened. Well, to cut a long story short I abandoned my OU studies in February and, at present, I am not sure if I will be continuing on with them. Though I was reluctant to stop working on these courses, in the end I had to because they were taking up far too much of my time. On reflection it would have been better for me to have started just one of these courses instead of both of them and if I had I would probably have kept going. However, due to the changes that the OU made to the time limits for the degree I was taking and the fact that these courses were going to be discontinued, it wasn't possible for me to do this and so eventually I sort of gave in and didn't have the will power to continue. It is a pity but it isn't the end of the world. I feel it is a shame that the OU made these wholesale changes to their degree structure that left people like myself, who like to take things at a considered pace, high and dry. It's their loss as well as mine.
So what now? I have gone back to reading Elements of Number Theory by John Stillwell and have nearly got half way through the book. I am both reading and understanding the text as well as answering the exercises. It is a well written book and the exercises bring out what is in the text without being overly difficult. I have just finished the chapter on the Pell Equation and I liked the visual approach of Conway which is described. I also went through the previous chapter on the RSA cryptosystem and this enhances what we learnt at the OU. I have written some programs for coding and decoding messages on my other calculator blog.
As for the future I am not really sure what direction I should now take. I suspect I will continue on with the personal study until I get that desire to study more formally again. There are plenty of courses that are appearing online as Chris has been pointing out.
