In the third year, there are 35 lecture courses, and a computational project. As in the second year, students decide how many courses to take: usually three or four a term. Again, there is no fixed number for examination purposes.
At the end of the year, there are four three-hour examinations, and reports are submitted for the computational projects course.
Examples of course topics
The courses include some whose content may be guessed at from the titles, such as:
- Number Theory;
- Coding and Cryptography,
- Mathematical Biology,
- Cosmology,
- Logic and Set Theory,
- Principles of Statistics,
- Waves.
and some whose content remains obscure unless you have already encountered these topics:
- Galois Theory (advanced group theory in which it is proved that you can’t in general solve a quintic equation);
- Algebraic Topology (in which properties of similar shapes - such as doughnuts and teacups - are classified);
- Asymptotic Methods (how functions behave at large values of their arguments);
- General Relativity (a theory of gravity);
- Stochastic Financial Models (how to predict unpredictable markets).
See a full list of courses here.
