Harbingers of Artin's Reciprocity Law. II. Irreducibility of Cyclotomic Polynomials

Abstract

In the first article of this series we have presented the history of auxiliary primes from Legendre's proof of the quadratic reciprocity law up to Artin's reciprocity law. We have also seen that the proof of Artin's reciprocity law consists of several steps, the first of which is the verification of the reciprocity law for cyclotomic extensions. In this article we will show that this step can be identified with one of Dedekind's proofs of the irreducibility of the cyclotomic polynomial.