MPhil in Advanced Computer Science requires Maths to an A-level standard

I am currently a first year student studying computer science and I intend to apply to the MPhil in Advanced Computer Science in a few years, however on the requirements it says
"Mathematics to A-level standard or equivalent will be presumed"
I did not do A-level maths and do not currently have an equivalent, I was wondering what would be the best way, while at university, to get the A-level maths equivalent.
Thanks

Reply 1

DFranklin

In the first instance, I'd ask your current university - it's easier to learn if you have some level of support, and people needing to augment their maths knowledge is common enough that they might have existing classes.

Otherwise, choose an exam board, get the specification and a course book and start going through it, I guess.

I might be wrong about this, but I would expect "A-level maths equivalent will be presumed" to more-or-less mean "an A/A* level knowledge of maths A-level will be presumed" (at least as far as the "pure" part of the A-level specification is concerned). Just being able to "pass" A-level maths is probably not good enough.

What I don't know is how the requirement interacts with what they'll expect you to have covered in your C.S. course. Being able to compare the asymptotic growth of a

O(n^n)

algorithm v.s.

O(n! 2^n)

requires post A-level math, and if you can do things like that I'd be less concerned about whether you know how to model a block sliding on a rough slope.

You should probably look at the current modules, get an idea of which you'd probably want to do, and then read up enough to get a rough idea of what mathematical background would be expected. Again, I don't actually know, but I would expect Cambridge to tend towards a fairly mathematical approach. So if you're doing Machine Learning, for example, I expect you'd need some understanding of the math behind it, not just how to join some stuff together in Tensorflow.

University of Cambridge

Cambridge

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