Cambridge Maths Students and Applicants

What does best 3 exactly mean?

Does maths and further maths count as 2 of the 3?


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Why do you hope so???

Cause I want my name to be read when I am senior wrangler. 65 alphas don't watch.


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Make sure you wear your liquid nitrogen brain cooling equipment when you sit part II.

I was reading Littlewoods Miscellany and he talks about the tripos back in the early 20th century - talking about how it was believed that the top candidates would have to be working 8 hours a day, doing mostly timed questions, in order to have a shot at top wrangler positions. This would have been on top of everything else.

Is a similar attitude still held at the very top end? I know it is obviously a very different atmosphere now but if you are taking 17 courses and get 34 alphas (or similar) you must surely still be doing a hell of a lot of work. Any comments with personal insight would be much appreciated.

How many courses might a person with a good first (top 10%) take to exam, and how many alphas would be expected? I am finding it hard to obtain this info.

I achieved 27th in the year which is approx top 10% with 15A, 12B obtained from 9 courses taken to exam. I would say I probably spent 2-3 hours a day on past papers so that may not be an exaggeration though it should be said that I don't believe work alone will get anyone senior wrangler.

I was reading Littlewoods Miscellany and he talks about the tripos back in the early 20th century - talking about how it was believed that the top candidates would have to be working 8 hours a day, doing mostly timed questions, in order to have a shot at top wrangler positions. This would have been on top of everything else.

Is a similar attitude still held at the very top end? I know it is obviously a very different atmosphere now but if you are taking 17 courses and get 34 alphas (or similar) you must surely still be doing a hell of a lot of work. Any comments with personal insight would be much appreciated.

How many courses might a person with a good first (top 10%) take to exam, and how many alphas would be expected? I am finding it hard to obtain this info.

What is all of this about abolishing public class lists next year. I am a bit confused - has it been agreed upon already? I was looking forward to them - a taste of the old fashioned hilariously competitive tripos.

It would be a pity if my year was the first year to not have them. I was reading one of the tripos exam reports and they were discussing penalization of poor handwriting, concluding that they must be tough because it is a necessary part of a good education to be able to write mathematics well. Is it also not useful to encourage students to engage in friendly competition? (bit of an odd link I know, but it seems to me to be a useful skill in general)

For example, I personally never attended a big competitive grammar school or anything else where competition was rife (in academics or sport) and I can confess that I can be a bit of a sore loser and even a bad winner. I was looking forward to studying an openly competitive maths degree where I could learn to be competitive in a more reasonable way. I just think it will be a shame to see that element of the course diminished (not entirely of course but in a substantial way).

I was reading Littlewoods Miscellany and he talks about the tripos back in the early 20th century - talking about how it was believed that the top candidates would have to be working 8 hours a day, doing mostly timed questions, in order to have a shot at top wrangler positions. This would have been on top of everything else.

Is a similar attitude still held at the very top end? I know it is obviously a very different atmosphere now but if you are taking 17 courses and get 34 alphas (or similar) you must surely still be doing a hell of a lot of work. Any comments with personal insight would be much appreciated.

How many courses might a person with a good first (top 10%) take to exam, and how many alphas would be expected? I am finding it hard to obtain this info.

Yeah I think next year will be the first year not to have them. I think it's been pretty much decided that they will be gone, but it still needs to be finally formally approved by some committee within the university.

EDIT: For people who are interested, the internal discussion had by the university about the public display of class-lists can be read here:

https://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2015-16/weekly/6426/section6.shtml#heading2-15

I achieved 27th in the year which is approx top 10% with 15A, 12B obtained from 9 courses taken to exam. I would say I probably spent 2-3 hours a day on past papers so that may not be an exaggeration though it should be said that I don't believe work alone will get anyone senior wrangler.

I was reading Littlewoods Miscellany and he talks about the tripos back in the early 20th century - talking about how it was believed that the top candidates would have to be working 8 hours a day, doing mostly timed questions, in order to have a shot at top wrangler positions. This would have been on top of everything else.

Is a similar attitude still held at the very top end? I know it is obviously a very different atmosphere now but if you are taking 17 courses and get 34 alphas (or similar) you must surely still be doing a hell of a lot of work. Any comments with personal insight would be much appreciated.

I took only 6. Depends how ballsy you're willing to be. I actually found it easier to have no choice of questions, but that could just be me.

I agree. I've always seen it as a combination of talent, work and being ahead of the curve, of which I think the last is the most important.

Many congratulations on the consistently brilliant results .



I could maybe get Leo to do an AMA if there's enough interest .



It's much easier if you take courses in earlier years, and self-study even earlier than that... I remember Leo broadly learnt Rep Theory in IA Michaelmas, for example (supervised in IB Lent). He left after a term of IB not knowing Galois and came back knowing Galois. He did supervisions in II Alg Top in IB Mich, learning it much as anyone else would learn a course in their own year. Same term, he (relatively) sketchily attempted III Algebraic Number Theory, but consolidated it enough to breeze through Number Fields over a year later. And by now, he has a good grasp of Alg NT and Category Theory, and has made inroads into like 6 other part III courses.

The details may be wrong in places but you get the idea .



Nice. I'm the same r.e. question choice. I took only 4 courses but then I did only get a low 2.1 .


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Thanks for the info.
If it is possible an AMA would of course be very interesting, though I would of course wait to see how much interest there is from the rest of TSR. At least then we wouldn't be talking about him in 3rd person

He did representation theory in IA - so had he basically self studied most of the first two years before? It definitely seems as though it is necessary to go quite a bit ahead.

I know someone who was either senior wrangler, or top in pure or something like that, quite a while ago. Back in those days, you only got funding for 3 years so anyone intending to do part iii had to go straight to IB (so quite a lot of people did it) which I guess would be considered ahead of the curve today - though I imagine what top schools would teach before uni may have been a bit more advanced than it is now (in accelerated classes anyway). Or perhaps it is still possible just really quite tough.

Disclaimer: I am not really intending to do any of this - purely academic.

Is it still possible to start with IB?

I agree. I've always seen it as a combination of talent, work and being ahead of the curve, of which I think the last is the most important.

Many congratulations on the consistently brilliant results .



I could maybe get Leo to do an AMA if there's enough interest .



It's much easier if you take courses in earlier years, and self-study even earlier than that... I remember Leo broadly learnt Rep Theory in IA Michaelmas, for example (supervised in IB Lent). He left after a term of IB not knowing Galois and came back knowing Galois. He did supervisions in II Alg Top in IB Mich, learning it much as anyone else would learn a course in their own year. Same term, he (relatively) sketchily attempted III Algebraic Number Theory, but consolidated it enough to breeze through Number Fields over a year later. And by now, he has a good grasp of Alg NT and Category Theory, and has made inroads into like 6 other part III courses.

The details may be wrong in places but you get the idea .



Nice. I'm the same r.e. question choice. I took only 4 courses but then I did only get a low 2.1 .


Posted from TSR Mobile

Back in those days, you only got funding for 3 years so anyone intending to do part iii had to go straight to IB (so quite a lot of people did it) which I guess would be considered ahead of the curve today

...

Interesting - when I was at Cambridge (1977-81), part III was classified as an undergraduate course, and you received the "Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics" instead of the MMath that you get these days.

We were told that it was an "arrangement" with the government that allowed us to do an extra year funded as undergraduates (via local authority grants, as it was in those days). So I was fortunate enough to be fully grant funded for four years.

Some people did take IB in the firsar, t yebut that was very unusual.

The nice people at Cambridge did convert my "Certificate" into an MMath a few years ago when the arrangements were re-jigged.