gone…
Alas this course is no more, which is a shame of the first order. It wasn’t an easy course but I think that it was an important course. Everyone I’ve discussed it with has suggested that it was the hardest thing that they’ve ever done. But there are mathematicians and mathematicians…
I think that the difference was summed up, for me, when we were doing the exam post-mortem in the diggers. [There was a question, worth one mark, that required us to draw the graphs of a couple of sine functions.]
“That bloody sine, I found myself plugging numbers in”, three of us laughed, Chris looked at us quizzicaly.
“It was a sine of period a quarter and then it was rotated onto the line y equals x.” What some find easy others find hard.
I’ve found other courses more challenging and what we learnt here was, in the words of the last unit, “some essential tools for the pure mathematician’s toolkit”
what was involved?
Rather a lot! There were three blocks—
- Block 1: topological/metric spaces
- Block 2: surfaces
- Block 3: some really tough stuff and fractals
The surfaces bit was considered to be the easy block, personally I struggled. It turns out that I don’t have the mind that I thought that I had.
I won’t go into any more details, as it seems a bit pointless given that the course is now a dead one.
what did you do neil?
This was the watershed course for me—I’m going to do a maths MSc but I now know that I’ll never be a mathematician, my mind isn’t right for it. So why am I trying? I’m trying because there were times, during the course, where I felt an immense sense of personal satisfaction with my mind, ‘I can understand this!’. This hard stuff. That’s priceless.
To attempt, however badly, something that is beyond you is the human condition. We should rejoice in this; the demise of the topology course is to be regretted.
a good course?
Yes. This was something that stretched even the best. It made me see the world in an entirely different way. Can we ask for more?