Math at Uni

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dragons_circle

Yep, I'm already getting a headstart with classics such as log cabin plus c and a cat losing its' mu.
http://csusap.csu.edu.au/~sbuckley/maths/funpage/jokes1.htm - great website!

Nice site. I love the proof ones.

One of my personal (and most useful) favourites, is proof by skipping out a bunch of tricky lines which I claim to be "intuitively obvious." You'd be surprised how often it's worked.

Reply 21

bally

ssmoose

Here are some first year Imperial notes I've looked through. http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/~wchen/ln.html

So few people are true geniuses, there wouldn;t be enough to fill many of the courses. Obviously at each different university you will be stretched different ammounts. If you get top grades and went for a university which has a relatively easy course I expect you would be rarely challeneged, however even top grades does not guarentee that you will do well at the universities at the top end of the spectrum. Why is there a large stipulus about maths degrees being for genei? I mean Physics degrees are tough too as are just about every other discipline.
I don't know what the Danish system's like, but I find that people who do not take Maths (this is as post 16 eductaion) have no idea about what we study and will have no idea about what you're talking about. Even people who study single maths have difficulty speaking about the further maths course. But really, how much are you planning to try and speak maths to people who don't do it? I mean, "I know all about this special condition of zeta beta function and am using it to prove Riemann would not impress a girl not doing maths. A girl doing maths would know you're chatting ****.
Hope I've been of help.

Mate, they are from Macquarie Uni in Australia ! A guy from imperial wrote them, that's all!

Reply 22

ssmoose

Mate, they are from Macquarie Uni in Australia ! A guy from imperial wrote them, that's all!

Ooops

Reply 23

bally

ssmoose

Ooops

No problem. I remember reading them for my final school exams!

Reply 24

lo2

Just watched a program in school about this guy who proved Fermat last theorem. I am sure you have heard quite a lot of that, so does any of you do stuff like that? And do you know that guy who proved it? And do you know anything of the prove?

My teacher said that it would like take him 4-5 years to fully understand the prove, if he was able to understand it, which he was not sure he would be.

Reply 25

AlphaNumeric

It's far too pure mathsy for me, but I've several friends who did "Elliptic Curves" as a course last term, one of whom also did a reading course (not lectured, but you read a textbook or two and sit an exam on it) in Modular forms as well. The actual thing that Wiles proved was the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil conjecture. The conjecture was that there is a bijection between modular forms and elliptic curves, or in plainer language for every elliptic curve there is a unique corresponding modular form, and vice versa (ie modular form A corresponds to elliptic curve B which corresponds to modular form A).

Fermat's last theorem is a corrollary of that proof. The proof never set out to specifically prove FLT, but it was a nice 'bonus' to proving the conjecture.

You can find the proof using Google. I've flicked through it, but as RichE has already mention in this thread, when it comes to pure maths I don't know my delta from my elbow and the proof is a sea of symbols and terms that mean nothing to me. My pure maths friends would be able to recognise some of the things in the proof but not follow the majority of it I expect. RichE might follow quite a bit more, he's a dab hand at pure maths :p:

If your maths teacher did pure maths at uni then he'd be in with a chance, but if not then it'd take him a long while. Doing nothing else but groups, galois theory, ellptic curves, modular forms and probably half a dozen other topics required someone might be able to learn enough to understand the proof in a couple of years. Galois theory is a 3rd year course here at Cambridge and that's only the basics of the stuff Wiles used to do his proof.

Even if I had 4 or 5 years of doing no other maths but that I don't think I could manage it, my brain just isn't wired for that kind of maths. Sure, if I worked at it, I'd be a lot better at pure maths than I am now, but that level of pure maths is beyond the vast majority of people no matter how much time they put in to it!

Reply 26

lo2

If you do not think that you are a genius at math, but you like it and would like to study it, but do not think that you could do some of most advanced things inside (do not know wheter this is correct) math. Are there any 'easy' way or would you just not recommend a such person to study math.

For instance if you want to be, High School (do not quite know the system so it might be the wrong thing) teacher, when I say High School, I mean teaching young people from about 16-20 years of age. I hope that you understand.