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Do math students do dissertaions?

If so what sort of things do they do it on?
Reply 1
Avatar for Dragon
Dragon
10
Yes they do. Dissertations can be written on any area of mathematics.
Original post by Dragon
Yes they do. Dissertations can be written on any area of mathematics.


Do they contain formula's or do they just talk about mathematical techniques?
Reply 3
Avatar for Dragon
Dragon
10
Well each dissertation is different, and I haven't actually done one so I can only speculate, but I assume it would involve building on research/papers you have read. This would involve a literature review, examining theorems and their applications and probably proving theorems or deriving formulas of your own.
Reply 4
Avatar for majikthise
majikthise
Yes they do, although it isn't as large a chunk of your final year mark as for some other subjects (i.e. exams still count for the majority of assesment).
Usually after some discussion, your supervisor will suggest an area of mathematics to study. Then you go away and read up on it, before writing up an expository report on what you've learnt (whilst taking a crash course in LateX typesetting, if you haven't met it before). Applied projects may well involve computer work to calculate solutions to some problem using a method you studied. For pure projects you can construct interesting examples of objects exhibiting whatever property/theorem you're investigating.

If it's a substantial project (or if you have a pushy supervisor), then you may be asked to prove some new result- possibly an obscure special case of something your supervisor is interested in but doesn't have the inclination to prove right now.
I attempted to prove a new unprovabilty result relating to ramsey theory, but failed utterly in doing so. Ended up writing a literature review of the conditions under which Suslin trees exist instead, which was interesting but not quite as satisfying.
(edited 13 years ago)

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