Author Description

This volume is dedicated to Harvey Cohn, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at City College (CUNY). Harvey was one of the organizers of the New York Number Theory Seminar, and was deeply involved in all aspects of the Seminar from its first meeting in January, 1982, until his retirement in December, 1995. We wish him good health and continued hapiness and success in mathematics. The papers in this volume are revised and expanded versions of lectures delivered in the New York Number Theory Seminar. The Seminar meets weekly at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). In addition, some of the papers in this book were presented at a conference on Combinatorial Number Theory that the New York Number Theory Seminar organized at Lehman College (CUNY). Here is a short description of the papers in this volume. The paper of R. T. Bumby focuses on "elementary" fast algorithms in sums of two and four squares. The actual talk had been accompanied by dazzling computer demonstrations. The detailed review of H. Cohn describes the construction of modular equations as the basis of studies of modular forms in the one-dimensional and Hilbert cases.