Mathematics with Economics Personal Statement

There's absolutely no need to mention ANY economics or finance in your personal statement. They pretty much expect you to be applying for straight Maths everywhere else, don't worry. Focus on getting a good statement down for Imperial/Warwick/Oxford, LSE will just happen automatically.

I'm fairly sure you should get an offer with your grades + a good maths personal statement (don't think anyone will really care much about your A in GCSE Economics, given your very strong maths grades).

I'd recommend not talking about the Black Scholes equation in your statement though - no one at LSE will seriously believe you know anything about it + there's a good chance someone in your Oxford interview will bring it up and destroy you on it (I mentioned something about Euclid's algorithm or Diophantine equations in my personal statement - I'd seen one or two applications of it and knew some brief things - but got completely destroyed in my interview even though I said I don't know much about it and explained how much I knew). It's just not something you want to be worried about/revising before your interviews. The value added by talking about it is a lot less than the potential problems that arise, in my view. On top of that, I think it's best to stick with pure maths topics over applied maths topics in general.

Thank you so much for the advice, especially about the Black Scholes stuff - I (foolishly) hadn't really thought of it in terms of Oxford... I just really hope you're right about the economics.

Their website is still worrying me a little:

'For either undergraduate programme offered by the Maths department, an original and interesting personal statement which outlines your enthusiasm and motivation for the study of both subjects is expected.'

But thanks again for the advice (+rep)

Don't worry about the website; previously when there was ONLY Maths and Economics at LSE, people would get in all the time with no mention at all of economics. This probably holds true now, but especially for Maths with Economics I'm sure they don't expect you to talk about economics. I know the professor involved with admissions and I've heard him say that they expect Maths with Economics students to really just be proper maths students.

I think mentioning a bit of game theory probably covers your "with Economics" problem anyway, but even without it I think you're fine.