What makes a maths degree so difficult?

Degree maths is more about understanding whereas a levels were just remembering how to answer questions tbh.

At my uni we only get like 3 past papers and we don't get full solutions for them, so you can't just hammer the past papers for uni.

But tbh uni maths is a lot better than a levels, I'm getting much higher grades now than I did during a level.


Posted from TSR Mobile

I did A-level maths and found it pretty easy, just doing past paper after past paper.
Im assuming this method doesn't work at degree level as many people say maths is as hard a degree that you can do and I was just wondering what the differences are? Is it more about the understanding than the actual doing?

At least in the pure courses, the focus changes to proving things, as opposed to learning more complicated techniques. The C and FP A-Level units aren't really pure maths - they are really "methods" courses. You'll still have a few of these in the first couple of years at uni, but pure very much becomes the focus.

In pure courses, you learn "why" things work. In your first few lectures you might prove there are infinitely many primes, or why there are "more" irrational numbers than rational numbers. You will also learn in great detail why calculus works in Analysis courses.

No matter how good you are, the speed of the course will get to you eventually. Of course, when this is depends on your individual talent and how demanding your course is. One thing that struck me was that in my first week one 50 minute lecture summarised all of the FP2 and FP3 calculus. If you didn't study further maths (and plenty didn't when I went to uni), that was all you got. It only got faster from there.

No matter how good you are, at some point you will get stuck. That's because maths is hard. It has taken humanity millenia to learn as much as it has now. But for you, if you're faced with an unseen problem, you still have to figure out how to solve it yourself. It's almost unheard of for people (at the best universities) to get 100% in an exam.

You will have to learn to be rigorous and logical. This is because a mathematical proof is, almost by definition, rigorous and logical. You will need to be able to spot likely ways to prove something new because in an exam you should be asked to solve an unseen problem.

Maths lectures take a while to get used to, not least because the quality of the lecturers will massively vary. Some of that is just personal preference - you're going to get on with some styles more than others. But every maths grad will have a story of a nightmare lecturer who you couldn't understand / couldn't help falling asleep in the lectures.

No one spoon feeds you. If you don't understand something, tough. You have to essentially figure it out yourself. Good courses should have support mechanisms but you will be forced to work independently through your difficulties. You will get problem sheets, which you can think of as homework except most questions will be rock hard. Ib my experience, you don't get "drills" (i.e. 50 questions to solve very similar problems to hone your technique). I guess the theory is, if you understand something you don't need to solve the same type of problem twice.

You will lose motivation at some point in your degree. That's either from boredom (many people realise they didn't like maths after all), frustration (you can spend ages thinking about a problem and get nowhere), or burn-out (three / four years is a pretty serious chunk of your life!). Hopefully you'll get over it, but mark my words, you won't always be as enthusiastic as you might be at the start.

In the later parts of the degree, you are learning relatively new mathematics. Most of the stuff that I learnt in my final year was less than 50 years old. If you think about it, your children will probably learn very different maths than you if they're crazy enough to do one. Some fourth year courses are actually "research seminars" in disguise, where you get to learn some cutting edge stuff. The problem with that is that no one has bothered to consolidate everything so that is nice and neat to learn from.

After graduating with a bsc in maths do I have to take a further year to do finance if I wanted to go that route


Posted from TSR Mobile

I know this guy at Cambridge doing maths, in his third year and apparently he's just losing the plot with it.

...

Imperial College?

University of East London?

I just wanted to know if you went to Imperial College, since I think I saw somewhere something that suggested you went to Imperial College.

Your post would be useful for me as a taste of what an Imperial College maths course is like from a student that's been there, assuming you wrote that out of your own experience as an undergraduate