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> I never encountered tensors or differential forms. Your UK undergraduate physics must have been a bit different to mine. About a third of my physics course w

> I never encountered tensors or differential forms. Your UK undergraduate physics must have been a bit different to mine. About a third of my physics course was taught by the maths dept, and tensors/algebras were very much a part of that. I recall, after freshers week, the dean getting everyone together. He said two things: - Hopefully you all had a great fresher's week, now it's down to business, and - Make sure you have fun at college. He also had a projection on the overhead saying "If you can't blind them with science, baffle them with bullshit". I'm reasonably certain the second statement above was the latter, because... He then casually mentioned a "maths refresher" 2 week course that all freshers had to take before "the real stuff" started. That "maths refresher" was the entire Further Maths 'A' level syllabus. In two weeks. Those of us who had done Further Maths at school were fine. Those that hadn't were shell-shocked.

chriswarbo 5y ago
> That "maths refresher" was the entire Further Maths 'A' level syllabus. In two weeks. Those of us who had done Further Maths at school were fine. Those that hadn't were shell-shocked. Heh, I recall managing to coast for a short time thanks to having done AS Further Maths. The Further Maths syllabus was quite modular, and the modules our teachers picked had some discrete math (sorting algorithms, Dijkstra's algorithm, bridges of königsberg, etc. which was useful for comp. sci.), and some which complemented the regular maths course (complex numbers and more calculus, which was certainly useful for physics).
- spacedcowboy 5y ago
  Our Further Maths was a lot less modular. Preparation for it started in the 2nd year (so 12/13 years old), when we were streamed for maths - if you were in set-1, you studied to take 'O' level (showing my age here) in 4th year (so a year earlier than most) on an accelerated schedule. That meant you could take AO (a halfway house between O and A) when everyone else was taking their normal O levels. The thing is that the extra stuff in AO was all Pure Maths, and formed a fair amount of the easier "P1" maths syllabus for the normal A level maths exam, which had P1 and Me1 (Maths with mechanics 1, basically statics). Because you'd done that work already prior to the A level years, you could take "A level maths" after only 1 year (which looked really good on UCCA applications :), so you've now done an exam consisting of the two 'P1' and 'Me1' papers in the first year of your A levels. Which meant that in the second year of your 'A' levels, you could do 'Pure Maths' (P1, P2) and 'Further Maths' (Me1, Me2) for a total of 3 maths A levels. On top of that, you had your other two subjects (mine were Physics and Chemistry), and because it was the JMB board, everyone got to do "General Studies". Getting all of them gave you 6 A levels, even though some of the work was duplicated in the maths arena (over different years of course :) S levels were a bonus on top - there was no fudging for those, though, you just took what you thought would be useful to study. They gave me maths and physics because I'd said I was going to do physics at college... :)
tsimionescu 5y ago
> That "maths refresher" was the entire Further Maths 'A' level syllabus. In two weeks. Those of us who had done Further Maths at school were fine. Those that hadn't were shell-shocked. Heh, that reminds me of my first physics course in an under-graduate computing degree (in Romania). The curriculum was so well designed overall that this Physics course needed linear algebra concepts that would be taught halfway-through the semester in Algebra, integration along a surface and similar that would be taught at a similar in the Calculus course, and some Statistics I don't remember that would be only be taught in the second semester. The prof's solution? He taught a 3-hour course covering all of the above, and considered that good enough for all future courses. This particular Physics course later went on to cover analytical mechanics (generalized coordinates, Lagrangians, Hamiltonians), electricity, general relativity, statistical thermodynamics, and quantum mechanics, all in a single semester. Needless to say, 99% were happy they passed and couldn't tell you a single thing about any of these subjects a few minutes after the final exam.

chriswarbo 5y ago

> That "maths refresher" was the entire Further Maths 'A' level syllabus. In two weeks. Those of us who had done Further Maths at school were fine. Those that hadn't were shell-shocked. Heh, I recall managing to coast for a short time thanks to having done AS Further Maths. The Further Maths syllabus was quite modular, and the modules our teachers picked had some discrete math (sorting algorithms, Dijkstra's algorithm, bridges of königsberg, etc. which was useful for comp. sci.), and some which complemented the regular maths course (complex numbers and more calculus, which was certainly useful for physics).

spacedcowboy 5y ago
Our Further Maths was a lot less modular. Preparation for it started in the 2nd year (so 12/13 years old), when we were streamed for maths - if you were in set-1, you studied to take 'O' level (showing my age here) in 4th year (so a year earlier than most) on an accelerated schedule. That meant you could take AO (a halfway house between O and A) when everyone else was taking their normal O levels. The thing is that the extra stuff in AO was all Pure Maths, and formed a fair amount of the easier "P1" maths syllabus for the normal A level maths exam, which had P1 and Me1 (Maths with mechanics 1, basically statics). Because you'd done that work already prior to the A level years, you could take "A level maths" after only 1 year (which looked really good on UCCA applications :), so you've now done an exam consisting of the two 'P1' and 'Me1' papers in the first year of your A levels. Which meant that in the second year of your 'A' levels, you could do 'Pure Maths' (P1, P2) and 'Further Maths' (Me1, Me2) for a total of 3 maths A levels. On top of that, you had your other two subjects (mine were Physics and Chemistry), and because it was the JMB board, everyone got to do "General Studies". Getting all of them gave you 6 A levels, even though some of the work was duplicated in the maths arena (over different years of course :) S levels were a bonus on top - there was no fudging for those, though, you just took what you thought would be useful to study. They gave me maths and physics because I'd said I was going to do physics at college... :)

tsimionescu 5y ago

> That "maths refresher" was the entire Further Maths 'A' level syllabus. In two weeks. Those of us who had done Further Maths at school were fine. Those that hadn't were shell-shocked. Heh, that reminds me of my first physics course in an under-graduate computing degree (in Romania). The curriculum was so well designed overall that this Physics course needed linear algebra concepts that would be taught halfway-through the semester in Algebra, integration along a surface and similar that would be taught at a similar in the Calculus course, and some Statistics I don't remember that would be only be taught in the second semester. The prof's solution? He taught a 3-hour course covering all of the above, and considered that good enough for all future courses. This particular Physics course later went on to cover analytical mechanics (generalized coordinates, Lagrangians, Hamiltonians), electricity, general relativity, statistical thermodynamics, and quantum mechanics, all in a single semester. Needless to say, 99% were happy they passed and couldn't tell you a single thing about any of these subjects a few minutes after the final exam.