Posted by martin on
Tuesday, 30 June 2009 at 22:42
I got my BA last week, and suddenly my time in Cambridge is at an end. The best bit of the graduation was when all the graduands process in academical dress (including hoods) from the college to the Senate House where the ceremony takes place. Many people, including all the bedders and no doubt a lot of unsuspecting tourists, came out to watch. I don’t know if colleges which are not as central as Trinity have such a procession; and while we got lovely weather, it wouldn’t be so fun in the rain (e.g. Magdalene got rained on).
A week before that, the Part II and Part III Maths results were read out in the Senate House (as last year - the results and graduation make the only three times I have been in the building). It is likely that this will be the last year that this is the first place where people hear their results. CUSU has been campaigning for them to be sent out by email before publication, on the grounds that getting your results in public is distressing for people who did badly. This has some truth, but I think that there is a significant advantage in learning your results along with your friends, as they will be in a better position to offer support than if you learned them privately (and maybe were then embarrassed about sharing them). This advantage applies to a much greater extent to the reading out of the Maths results, which everyone really does hear simultaneously, than to publication on the Senate House noticeboards as happens for other subjects.
Tags cambridge, partiii, tripos
Posted by martin on
Monday, 08 June 2009 at 13:32
The Part III exams took place in the last couple of weeks. It was quite strange for me to do exams where you are expected to answer all or most of the questions - the undergraduate maths exams have several times more questions to choose from than anyone could possibly do and in olympiad exams completing each question is an achievement.
The most common form of a Part III exam is questions which simply ask you to write out proofs from the course. Three of my five exams took this form, and it’s quite boring - except one of those, where the content was very hard so just recalling bits of the lectures is a challenge. Elliptic Curves livened things up a bit with some computation, although that is rather tedious in a different way. And my last exam, in Modular Forms, had a much better balance of bookwork and problems, although it was the hardest exam I did.
Tags partiii, tripos
Posted by martin on
Thursday, 19 June 2008 at 14:56
I am now officially a Wrangler (someone who gets a first in Part II of the Cambridge Maths Tripos). The results were announced this morning in the University Senate House - the chairman of the examiners stands in the balcony and reads out the lists of people awarded each class (another peculiarity of Maths Parts II and III; usually the list is just posted on a notice board outside the Senate House).
I will not however be graduating this year because I will be doing Part III Maths next year. This is not a proper postgraduate course - you don't get a degree at the end of it - and not eligible for postgraduate funding; until recently there has been an exception allowing you to continue to get undergraduate funding despite already having a degree. The government have noticed this year that this is no longer allowed, so now we have to not graduate until next year in order to continue to get funding.
Tags cambridge, tripos
Posted by martin on
Saturday, 07 June 2008 at 13:11
I had exams for the past week. For the past few weeks, I was doing not much but revising, although I went to Oundle two weeks ago for an IMO training camp and the final team selection. I did another geometry problem session, which was not as good as my one at Trinity because I had less time to prepare due to exam revision and because I had already used lots of my favourite questions on the first sheet.
I had four exams this week. All are essentially the same, and you are free to choose from 38 questions on all the different courses in the year. Of course noone has taken anywhere near all the courses - I took 12 and revised 9. In the end I did an average of five questions on each exam; I might have liked to do a bit more, but that is more than adequate for a first.
With exams over, I have a couple of weeks until the results with nothing in particular to do.
Tags cambridge, imo, teaching, trinity, tripos
Posted by martin on
Saturday, 03 May 2008 at 17:17
A substantial part of the past couple of weeks was occupied by CATAM, the computational projects for the Maths Tripos. For each project you write some computer programs for mathematical purposes, then write a report on the results you obtained and the mathematics involved. (This is the only part of the Maths Tripos assessment not done by exams.) This year's projects were more interesting than last year's - at least the ones I did contained a greater mathematical content, and got me interested in elliptic curves. I also did my programming this year in Scala, the language I learned last summer, to try out something different - I have never been entirely satisfied with any programming language for doing mathematics. (And now that I have got into functional programming I have moved the goalposts. I did my CATAM projects in an almost pure functional style, but there were a few places where I couldn't see any efficient way to do that.)
The deadline for that was on Wednesday, and I have finished my supervisions from last term yesterday, so now all that is left until the exams at the start of June is revision. That seems like a long time but there is a lot to revise (and longer than before since in previous years I did some lectures in Easter term).
Tags catam, programming, scala, tripos
Posted by martin on
Tuesday, 19 February 2008 at 17:09
Well it seems I have let it go for ages without posting anything. It is now week 5, which means we are just over half way through down. This term I am just doing four courses, because I didn't want to work as hard as I had to for last year's six courses.
The courses are: Algebraic Topology (using algebraic techniques to show that different types of object cannot be deformed into each other), Set Theory and Logic (formalising logic and the foundations of mathematics), Geometry and Groups (symmetries in normal 2 and 3 dimensional space, and the more exotic world of hyperbolic space - lots of this appears in Escher's pictures) and Number Fields (how concepts like prime numbers generalise to bigger sets of numbers than the usual integers). It becomes increasingly difficult to give one sentence descriptions of the courses as they build up on top of earlier concepts (e.g. topological spaces).
Last week I just stepped down as President of the Music Society. It was fun and I learnt a lot from it, but it was also hard work and I am quite relieved to give it up. I am confident that Vicky and the new committee will do a very good job. I have also recently become Treasurer of the Cambridge Lindy Hoppers.
Tags lindy, tcms, tripos
Posted by martin 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.
Tags tripos
Posted by martin on
Tuesday, 17 October 2006 at 20:29
Two weeks into term, here's a bit of what I'm doing. The courses I'm doing this term are: Analysis II, Linear Algebra, Methods, Quantum Mechanics and Markov Chains. Of these, Methods is probably the most interesting as it is techniques I know nothing about. Linear Algebra is particularly boring; this is not really a good term for pure courses. I am also going to the lectures for one course on General Linguistics, and this week I will be starting classes in Mandarin Chinese as well as continuing my German classes.
On Thursdays I am singing with the Trinity Singers, the non-audition chorus run by Trinity Singers who are doing Handel's _Messiah_ this term, and doing some of the organisation for that. We appointed a Singers Secretary last week, relieving me of much of that. And on Wednesdays I am going to swing dancing classes. This is nice because it is not just a university organisation although there are quite a lot of students who go. This is also one reason why I like Emmanuel United Reform Church (besides being Protestant and non-Established): there are few students there but well-integrated with the rest of the congregation - hard given the temporary nature of students and the ease for a church of catering to them as a distinct group.
--
Martin
Tags emmanuel, languages, lindy, tcms, tripos
Posted by martin on
Monday, 05 June 2006 at 08:36
I am now half way through my exams - two gone and two to go. The first did not go as well as I had hoped - the questions just took a long time. The second one, which I had expected to be the hardest, turned out to be easy and I completed it in just over two hours (out of three). There are two more today and tomorrow. There are some strange things like the fact that the invigilators wear gowns (although in Oxford the students have to wear academical dress, at least while entering and leaving the exam hall), and they began by addressing us as "ladies and gentlemen".
I was reading that the prime minister, shortly after taking office, has to prepare secret instructions which are carried on the UK's nuclear-missile submarines; should they be unable to detect any sign of life from the UK for several days, the captain of the submarine on patrol will open the instructions and carry them out (although it's hard to see who the missiles would be targetted at post-Cold War). Anyway this makes me wonder: politicians probably give little thought to this area of responsibility until suddenly it hits them when they become prime minister, and certainly the electorate don't consider who they would trust to make such decisions when voting. So I suppose the question is what makes the prime minister better qualified than anyone else to make such decisions, and to have them carried out even after the country has been completely destroyed? I remember a science fiction book which contained a planet who left decisions about whether to go to war up to their military commanders and were astonished at the idea of giving politicians a say.
Tags nukes, tripos
Posted by martin on
Thursday, 18 May 2006 at 09:26
Two weeks today until exams; the past papers seem to be reasonably doable - at least when you are used to olympiad problems that take hours each. We are still getting some lectures as well, of which the most interesting and hardest are on topology; I have been spending quite a bit of time thinking about this and learning it by discovery. (Very briefly, topology is the study of continuous maps: you start off with some space or surface, then map each point from that space to a point in some other space; the map is continuous if points that started off close together end up close together.)
There have been three TCMS concerts in the past couple of weeks, including a special one in the Wren Library instead of our normal venue of the chapel. That meant lots of moving of chairs from the chapel store to the library. It's a nice building but a slightly odd concert venue; actually both the Wren Library and the chapel are very long and thin, which seems to me a strange shape for a chapel.
--
Martin
Tags tcms, trinity, tripos