Extra curricular activities for maths???
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There's actually some fairly deep maths going on in the background of a game of Sudoku (I think it's been proved that Sudoku is NP-complete for example). I'm not saying playing the game will enhance your applications - but perhaps knowing that there are some interesting questions you can ask yourself, would.
Minesweeper also. Read Ian Stewart's article on it...you can find it on the clay institute site where the official millenium problem description of the P vs NP problem is.
Wrangler
There's actually some fairly deep maths going on in the background of a game of Sudoku (I think it's been proved that Sudoku is NP-complete for example). I'm not saying playing the game will enhance your applications - but perhaps knowing that there are some interesting questions you can ask yourself, would.
If I can remember the maths of sudoku is something to do with congruence classes under multiplication (in a table) ... or was it permutations under muliplictation (in a table) think it was the first, but it could apply to both.
It was explained by the professor in 'numbers, groups, and codes' lecture, am beginning to think I should pay more attention in lectures.
Wrangler
There's actually some fairly deep maths going on in the background of a game of Sudoku (I think it's been proved that Sudoku is NP-complete for example). I'm not saying playing the game will enhance your applications - but perhaps knowing that there are some interesting questions you can ask yourself, would.
Wrangler's Utopian Dream: "A man was sitting on the train looking at an empty Sudoku and an attractive young lady came up to him and asked if he needed help. He said that he was trying to prove Sudoku was NP-complete and she gave him a hand (with the puzzle that is!
) and together they solved it. They all lived happily ever after. 
"Sorry it is late
I actually spent a couple of hours reading the P-NP and the various related entries on Wikipedia, it turned out to be different to what I thought it was. I believed it was that the number of problems solvable given the computational lifetime and resources of the universe was equal (or not) to the number of problems NOT solvable given the computational lifetime and resources of the universe. It seems I was on the right lines but I now know that it is more precisely: does N=P where "the class P consists of all those decision problems that can be solved on a deterministic sequential machine in an amount of time that is polynomial in the size of the input; the class NP consists of all those decision problems whose positive solutions can be verified in polynomial time given the right information, or equivalently, whose solution can be found in polynomial time on a non-deterministic machine."
Afterwards I sat down for 10 minutes with a piece of paper and pencil and looked at the problem.
At the end of the 10 minutes, with the aid of some stick men, I came to the conclusion that somebody with only A Level Maths cannot even start to grasp the problem properly, so I made a paper plane out of the sheet, threw it at an unsuspecting teacher and went back to just putting the numbers 1-9 in every row, column and box.
As many have already said, taking part in the BMO competition is a great idea as well as AEA and STEP. Work experience in maths would be good too, somebody mentioned plus magazine, they do take people for work experience and would be an excellent choice!.
And sure, why not solve a few of the Clay Mathematics Institute problems in your spare time.
And sure, why not solve a few of the Clay Mathematics Institute problems in your spare time.
Lock please lol
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