Artin's Primitive Root Conjecture – A Survey

Abstract

Abstract.One of the first concepts one meets in elementary number theory is that of the multiplicative order. We give a survey of the literature on this topic emphasizing the Artin primitive root conjecture (1927). The first part of the survey is intended for a rather general audience and rather colloquial, whereas the second part is intended for number theorists and ends with several open problems. The contributions in the survey on `elliptic Artin' are due to Alina Cojocaru. Wojciec Gajda wrote a section on `Artin for K-theory of number fields,' and Hester Graves (together with me) on `Artin's conjecture and Euclidean domains.'