Michaelmas 2007
Posted by Martin Orr on Saturday, 01 December 2007 at 16:55
I have managed to get through an entire term without posting anything - this wasn't intended, but I have been very busy this term. A major part of the reason for that was that I did a lot of work - six 24-lecture courses, where I have done at most five in a term in the past. At the start of term I had only intended to do four or five courses. When I told Imre (my Director of Studies) that I wanted to do Principles of Quantum Mechanics because of its algebraic rather than physical content he told me I should do Linear Analysis, which covers the underlying mathematical ideas needed for most of physics in a very abstract way. This wasn't quite what I meant - QM is mathematically elegant in its own right - but I enjoyed both.
I was convinced to do Probability and Measure, which I hadn't intended to do, but turned out to be the course I enjoyed most. It puts the idea of probability on a rigorous footing, along with integration, and contains a lot of hard pure mathematics - most people, including me, found it difficult.
I also did Dynamical Systems, which looks at methods of figuring out the approximate long-term behaviour of equations which cannot be solved exactly. This turned out not to be as fun as I had hoped. Finally I did Graph Theory (graphs here are simple systems of dots some of which may be joined up) and Coding and Cryptography.