3rd Year Course Options

It’s been some time since my last post. It’s like I found other ways to procrastinate rather than writing here. Anyway, while I could be complaining about the group project I’m working on, it’s easier to look to the future and ponder next year’s course options.

Let’s start with the awesome facts. From next year on we are talking about 100% choice. There might be some minor restrictions such as only being allowed to take one non-maths option but for all practical purposes we may see this as 100% sheer awesomeness.

I’ll start with the first term. I’ll be taking 4 courses in each term, so I’ll start by giving my 4 most likely choices followed by the B-list. So let’s hit it:

To start with there are 3 courses in the first term that I consider fundamental

Metric & Topological Spaces, Measure & Integration and Elementary Number Theory.

So it’s unlikely that I’ll drop any of these or postpone them to the 4th year as I consider them too important. The first two weren’t anywhere close to my A-list a year or so ago when I first started considering 3rd year options. To be fair, they don’t really look like fun, especially not the one on Metric Spaces as I know the lecturer to be quite awful. Nevertheless I believe their content to be rather important and as such they’re clearly on my A-list.

So what’s my 4th choice for the first term, you may wonder. It’s bound to be

Group Theory

Bit of weird course title, considering that we’ve covered group theory in two courses so far. I liked how when they presented next year’s course options they said: ‘If you enjoyed group theory so far you should definitely take this course. If you didn’t, you still should take it’.

So what’s on my B-list you may wonder. There are only 2 serious contenders

Discrete Maths and Games, Risks and Decisions

Discrete Maths is mainly about elementary coding theory. The lecturer is awesome and still, I probably won’t take it. One good reasons for not taking it is that chances are that this course and the one on Graphs and Optimization will get replaced by a proper course on Combinatorics. So that alone makes it worth waiting an extra year. That and the fact that the syllabus for Discrete Maths isn’t really mind blowing stuff. Games, Risks and Decisions used to be on my A-list for ages. It’s the only reason why I took Probability and Stats II this year and yet it got kicked off my A-list. Now frankly I believe it’s got some fun maths, but at the same time it’s also got some annoying probability distributions kind of stuff. Though the main reason simply is that I believe that I will benefit more from the other options.

So let’s move on to the second term. My choices are bound to be
Functional Analysis, Galois Theory, Group Representation Theory and Algebraic Number Theory.

You may have noticed a pattern in my choices. It’s pretty clear that all my choices are pure maths. There’s no applied, stats or methods courses on my A-list. Technically I don’t really know much about any of these courses. It’s one thing to read the syllabus description and look up stuff online but until one has covered and hopefully understood the material there’s no way of telling whether the courses are anywhere as interesting/fun/important as one thought they would be.

The only thing worth mentioning on the B-list is Scientific Computation. The cool thing about that course is that it’s 100% project work. This would mean one less exam in the summer term, but it would also mean one less awesome maths course.

So these are bound to my choices for all its worth. Choosing courses turned out to be much easier than I first anticipated based on the simple fact that a number of courses that would have been serious contenders aren’t running (for example Ring and Modules, Complex Analysis II and Linear Algebra and Matrices).

In case you’re desperate to see all the exciting courses I chose to miss out on you can find the guide to courses online.