Warwick Maths Chat

Does anyone know if Gavin brown sets nice exams? I’ve got him for knot theory and my performance on the exam is entirely dependent on it being very similar in style to last year.

Why did I take PDEs instead of Commutative Algebra. I mean it doesn't like great but it still looks way nicer than PDEs and I'd have the same amount of time to revise for it. Wish I could go back and change it. Anything else would've been better tbh, even Fractal Geometry.

Just take Commutative Algebra next year lol. Something I found out recently - you don't actually have to pass 4th year modules, so one could overcat with them and just not actually attend any lectures or learn the course at all. In theory, you could go through the MMath with only one non-project 4th year module actually counting by just overcatting to 150 CATS in each of third year and fourth year.

On that note, I'm about to get my first 0 in two days from Hyperbolic Geometry because I never went after the first lecture and forgot to deregister, oops.

Hi guys,

I don't know if I've ever introduced myself on this chat before but I'm Lauren, a second year student.

I was just wondering if you guys had any tips for MA257 Introduction to Number Theory? I've learned most things in the notes now, but I still really struggle with lots of the unseen questions, and I haven't been able to find any particularly useful resources online

Thanks in advance

I sat this one last year when Cremona did this module (and I believe he did a few other years) so I'm not sure how similar this year's paper will be to the past papers. But yeah the past papers are relatively difficult, you need to know all your notes and be familiar with standard proofs/calculations from the example sheets, which takes a lot of time. And so does the exam - certainly one of the most unreasonable exams time-wise, even if you know what you're doing. As you said there are usually quite a few unseen questions as well, which are generally not straight forward, but the ideas required are usually quite simple. So for such questions it's best to try/consider a lot of ideas quickly instead of getting stuck trying to make one work. To this end it helps to consider the exact section of the notes the question relates to and think which lemmas/facts from there might be useful. But otherwise there's not much you can do to prepare for these, bar doing past paper questions. They're meant to be quite hard.

If it makes you feel any better, it gets scaled quite a lot. I did pretty badly in the exam (straight up blanked a handful of unseen questions) but a got a good mark in the end.

Thank you so much! Yeah the lecturer said it should be similar to past papers so at least I’ll have that to go by. But they are really difficult and the assignments were hard too. I agree with your point about timing in the exam, and to be fair I’ve found that with a lot of second year exams so far, but number theory is particularly bad. I’m praying for good scaling haha - last year I got 90s in my maths modules but with number theory I feel like I’d be over the moon with anything 65+

I can't say anything about advice for the content of the new number theory course, but I took it last year just as a throwaway for interest and despite being almost certain that I answered 60% worth of marks I magically ended up with a first. They usually scale nice.

You might get lucky anyway and not need to rely on scaling as I've had Adam for both Sets and Numbers and Analytic Number Theory and despite usually having difficulty with the material he likes to teach and problem sheets both exams I've had by him were extremely fair.

Nah I'm taking Set Theory next year and I think I can only take one third year module next year. Not that I'd take any more anyway - I don't particularly want or need to take CA but it's just that PDEs is so hard (and boring) that I wish I'd taken it instead so that it didn't ruin my average this year.
Yeah I'm surprised by that. It's a little silly how one can do well enough in the first three years to totally trivialise the fourth year isn't it? Surely a first class masters degree should require a half-decent performance in the 'masters' part of the degree. But I'm not complaining lol.

Lol. Would be cool if you could get both a 100 and a 0 but I imagine 100s are pretty unrealistic in 4th year.

Hate to break it to you but you do have to get a certain number of modules at a first class level in 4th year for a first class overall. So you need a decent 4th year performance

Where is this said though? I haven't seen anything in the course guidelines to suggest that it is insufficient to pass the fourth year and get 70%+ as your overall weighted mark.

Same. I mean it would make more sense if that was the case but I've looked carefully at the degree class regulations quite a few times and there's nothing saying that you need to do anything more than get 70% overall and pass a sufficient number of modules in 3rd and 4th year.

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/maths/undergrad/ughandbook2016/course/assessment/finalsexamconv_jun17.pdf

^The 2017-2018 version is the only one they have up, though I doubt it would have changed significantly this year.

I can't say anything about advice for the content of the new number theory course, but I took it last year just as a throwaway for interest and despite being almost certain that I answered 60% worth of marks I magically ended up with a first. They usually scale nice.

You might get lucky anyway and not need to rely on scaling as I've had Adam for both Sets and Numbers and Analytic Number Theory and despite usually having difficulty with the material he likes to teach and problem sheets both exams I've had by him were extremely fair.

Sorry to be a pain but could I just ask whether, at least for the papers you've sat by him, Adam tends to like asking bookwork-based questions? There are a lot of bookwork questions in the 2015-2018 number theory exams, and I feel much more confident about these than unseen ones!