OK. Hello, everyone, thank you for joining us today in Oxford. And welcome to you, the Mathematical Institute. Welcome to the mats open that I hope you have have you have a fantastic day? Say it's great to see so many of you here today. So my name is James. I'm the admissions coordinator for Masa Oxford. It's my job to make sure the admissions process is fair between all of the different colleges to make sure we take the best mathematicians. Here's the structure of the day.
I'm going to take half an hour at the start to talk about mathematics at Oxford, and then I'm going to give you two tasters of mathematics. First thoughts. Becky Neal is going to talk about pure mathematics. And then it's Dominic Vella is going to talk to you about applied mathematics. Just to leave come between the sessions if he wants to.
Later on, we've got 11:30. Neil Lawson James starts talking about two of the joint honours courses over here, and you might also be interested in talks over at the computer science faculty over the right. OK, but first, honestly, everything you need to know about mathematics at Oxford. So I'll forget. So welcome to the Andrew Wiles building. We've been based here since 2013, when the new building opened. It's a really nice building. It's got lots of maths built into it.
I hope that while you're here today, you get a chance to look around the building and see some of the mathematical features that we built into it. This is where all of the maths lectures happen. It's also where we keep all of the maths researchers and all the lecturers and all the people doing cutting edge maths research.
It's really nice having everyone in the same place in the same building as the Andrew Wallace building home of maths in Oxford has an intro to the courses that we offer in maths. We have eight of these really for four different courses maths and three joint honours courses maths with philosophy, maths statistics and maths with computer science. Each of those are offered as a three year BA or a four year master's course, and I put the approximate intake up there.
We don't have a precise number, but the approximate size is about 190 mathematicians, about 20 or 30 on each of the joint honours courses. So say a little bit more about the joint honours courses in a moment, but I always talk about just mathematics first. Since that the that's the biggest of those four courses. So here's what you might study in the first year of our maths skills. These are the courses that we've currently been lecturing to our first years in this lecture room.
So we've put all of our first year mathematicians together and we tell them about these topics, and it's a mix of things you've already heard about at school. But towards the end, from the ground up, things you've never heard of, possibly your new favourite sort of maths introduced to you in first year through these topics.
So we've got things that you might have seen before, from pure maths like algebra and calculus, but thought again, new things like group actions that maybe don't get to see at school. We teach remote very calculus and apply techniques like partial differential equations.
These are core skills that we think every mathematician should have so that later on, as you specialise into different sorts of maths, you've got these core skills at hand off the first year, we the second year where we go again, some some core courses, more of those skills that we think all mathematicians should have at the top there in large writing. And then some options for you to choose from. So you'll take five or six of these options from this list here in smaller writing.
And again, this is more and more options for you to think about taking. So we've got some pure maths up there, things like modules and topology, but also more applied maths options like learning about fluid dynamics and waves and quantum theory and mathematical biology as well. We teach our mathematicians special relativity if they want to know about special relativity. So as a second year and then in third year, it's kind of more of the same. I put the slide up.
Not really, so that you can read it, but just to demonstrate the huge variety of courses we're currently teaching to our third year mathematicians. You'll take maybe eight 10 of these courses in third year. So there's a huge variety of subjects up that we try to keep this up to date based on what our researchers are looking into based on cutting edge mathematics. Lots of these topics of maths didn't exist when we started teaching mathematics hundreds of years ago.
As we try to keep it up to date, that's all. That's our third year. It's just to either specialise into your favourite bits of maths or chance to do broad study in different areas of maths, putting together these different topics that you might have seen. It's just like I don't have a slide for fourth year of mathematics the Masters course, because there are even more courses to choose from.
There are about 50 or 60 courses at the moment in fourth year just to really specialise into certain areas of maths. One of the aims of our fourth year maths course is that it's a good preparation if you want to do the current research in mathematics. If you're interested in doing a Ph.D. or defence research and then our fourth year maths course is supposed to get you up to date in those areas of maths that you're interested in lots more topics in fourth year.
So it's a little bit about the joint honours schools. I'll start with Matins statistics because it's the easiest to explain. The first year for maths and statistics is exactly the same as maths. You do that that same core skills sets of courses in the first year. After that, you get access to more options in second and third year.
I more statistics options are, you know, the option to do more than 50 percent statistics if you want to assess the maths and statistics course, the chance to learn about machine learning and cutting edge data techniques. We also offer mathematics and philosophy, which is a chance for you to learn some core mathematical skills.
But also, the underpinning philosophy will take some philosophy courses alongside some of some of the core mathematics doing about 50 50 in the first year, with a chance to specialise through second and third years into those areas which really interest you. Mathematics Computer science starts out exactly 50 50 between maths and computer science, but has the chance for you to take more maths or computer science courses as you go through second and third year.
There's a joint on his courses again with a kind of flavour of mathematics throughout them, but the chance to take options from those other other subjects as well. I thought I'd say a little bit about the choice between three and four years. So the good news is you don't have to decide now whether you're going to be doing three years of mathematics or four years of mathematics.
This is a choice that I see lots of our students haven't made yet because we only asked them to make this choice at the start of third year based on how exams are going and how the sorts of topics that they're interested in developing, they might choose to stay on for this fourth year of mathematics. Students, I'm a as I've said, we use that fourth year as a way to get up to speed with cutting edge mathematics.
But but both degrees the three are in the four year degree, are well respected by employers for teaching you problem solving skills to be numerous. And in some cases, schools are really good at arguing logically about what's what's true. That's a choice between three and four years. You don't have to choose yet. Always want to throw in a quick advert for another fourth year course. I'm good maths and theoretical physics.
You can't apply for this one now because it's it's just a fourth year master's course and it's in cutting edge physics. It turns out that modern physics is really mathematical, and the sort of skills that you need to be a modern physicist includes lots and lots of mathematical skills. So this is the fourth year course that we have met people from, from either mathematics degrees or physics degrees.
And so after three years of doing maths, all three years of doing physics or physics in philosophy, you can apply to this fourth year dream master's in matters where theoretical physics and a huge variety of cutting edge physics in the based on maths topics and physics topics it's taught from. Taught by both departments because a quick advert for a master's course that you can't just apply for. OK, so how do we teach all of that content? We've got a kind of unique teaching model.
We've got lectures which you might expect to imagine 200 or so mathematicians in in this room in first year and somebody standing here and teaching you maths at the boards. We've got a taste of what that might look like in half an hour if you stay for 15 hours. Obviously, as a company by problem sheets, we like to tell all mathematicians what to do to test how,
how well they understand the topic so they can think about this in detail. But the nice thing we do in Oxford is we run these tutorials as well.
So in a small group with maybe two or three students and one cheetah will be a college lecturer or a college member of faculty or a graduate student or someone who really knows the course to go through those problem sets with you, to talk about the course and talk about where the course is going on is the chance to have an hour of discussion about the course in some detail,
which is really helpful for our students. It means we can put a lot of maths into our maths scores because we know that we've got that tutorial support to keep everyone up to speed with all the maths this developing. If there's something you don't really understand in the lectures, you can think about it on your own and then talk. Talk about it in the tutorial to keep up with all the maths that we're showing you.
That's in year one and two in years three and four. Again, we're still doing lectures for each option, normally in smaller class rooms as people who specialise more into those options and we run intercollegiate classes. So pulling people together from different colleges into a slightly larger group to talk about the problem sets with a teaching assistant and possibly lecturers lecturer support.
So that's the third or fourth year that we support everyone. Here's where it might look like for a typical week in first. Or at least you'd have 10 lectures here in this room 50 minute talks about mathematics these days, the lecturer might have handed out the notes beforehand on paper or online, and there's one problem sheet sets for every teach for lectures, something for you to work on in your spare time.
I want to really stress the independent study is an important part of university study of being a mathematician to have these problems that you're stuck on. You don't know how to do. You have to think about how you're going to overcome these, these challenges by really thinking about all the maths that you've seen before. So independence is important. I put that up as a research in libraries talking to other students because communicating about maths is important.
And as I've said, we've got these tutorials to support you as well. While you're here, I can. What a typical week might look like in first year in terms of assessments. We run mostly exams to assess our students at the end of the year. In fact, you have five exams of length between two and three hours. But this also tells you some computational mathematics projects. We don't expect our mathematicians to know any programming languages or have any programme experience when they start.
But we do expect that. If you taught them a bit of maths that it becomes easier to learn how to tell a computer how to do some maths. So we have these computational projects as well. In years three and four, there's a chance to do an extended project or write a dissertation alongside assessment through exams. This is also have some writing skills alongside of your maths skills. Employ a standard like if you can explain yourself.
Explain your mathematician. Explain your mathematics, as well as doing mathematics assessment. How can I convince him to put Oxford down? Is as one of just five universities that you apply for? Three. You? Well, I hope you've. I convinced you that there's there's a lot of maths in our maths scores and we pack all of our maths into into that course. If you want a course with lots of different maths topics with lots of great teaching for that maths.
And then this is a great course that you should consider applying to. It's also quite a difficult maths course, which means it's a challenge for people and for some mathematicians, that's really great. That's what you want. Of course, with lots of maths in it so that this is a sort of challenging test of how good you are at maths that's backed up by that tutorial support that I've mentioned through a friendly collegiate atmosphere, which I'll say more about in a minute.
You might be impressed by the academic reputation of our course and cheaters, or by the employability prospects of our graduates. So our say a little bit more about colleges. I've mentioned this friendly collegiate atmosphere, not something I really believe in that are mathematicians aren't just members of the mathematical S.G. They're all associated with a particular college. And there are 29 colleges which admit mathematicians.
I mean, that's the sort of community of not just that club of mathematicians, but also people studying other subjects. It means that our first years come to the lectures and they meet other mathematicians, but they also have a college community where they meet people who aren't mathematicians, which is always healthy as well.
So meeting people, not mathematicians, and those colleges tend to organise student societies, sports activities and canteen a dining hall and opportunities to really gel as a as a college community, at least in first yacoobi accommodation in a lot of cases, second and third year accommodation as well through the colleges. If you're here in Oxford today, you've got a chance to visit some colleges.
They're all open and very keen for you to have a look around and see the accommodation, see what the college site is like. People often ask me how to choose a college or which college is the best, and it's part of my job to say that every college is the best. Every college is fantastic in its own way. The colleges are much more similar than they are different. Remember, everyone comes here for their maths lectures, so everyone's getting the same quality of maths education.
We get the same lectures and the same problems, that same exams. At the end, we take the best applicants, regardless of which college you've applied to. So we've got lots of processes behind the scenes to compare candidates from different colleges to make sure that we're taking the best people, regardless of which college they've applied to. As a result, 25 percent of our first years in this room aren't at the college that they applied to.
But if you ask them which college is best at the end of first time, I've got a feeling that all of them know that their college is the best. Something about a college atmosphere again makes it a really nice place to be. And there's also the thing you can do good an open application.
If you really can't choose between the colleges, then you might put an open application, in which case you'll be automatically assigned to a college by a computer algorithm and then treat it exactly as if you'd applied to that college. The Cheetahs won't know that you've made an open application. I'm quite keen to get treated exactly as if you made a direct application to that so that college is of no advantage, no disadvantage to them.
OK, so I like thrown together, hear some some details of how the application process actually works. If you put the Oxford on your UCAS form, as I hope you will, and then you'll need to apply by the 15th of October. Deadline is 6pm on 15th October. Placing A-levels you expect to be doing maths on if your school offers both maths. We expected to be doing further maths as well. More on that in a moment. You also need to be registered to take the maths admissions test.
I have some boring registration details coming up, I'm afraid, so most candidates will say this in their school or college. If you're if you currently sit tests in your school or college, then you'll probably set the maths there as well. Your school or college needs to be registered as a test centre, and they need to register you to take the test. In practise, this just means make sure that your school knows that you're you're going to be taking this maths admissions test at the end of October.
The registration process takes at least day, and there are details on this website of the people who administer our test for us. OK, just details about how you register for the maths admissions test. I should say, if you're sitting this worldwide, then we say maths test for everyone around the world and you'll see this in a registered test centre. You can find a list of registered test centres on our website, the same website that you set for open test centres where you can take this test.
OK, so details on the maths emissions do some actual actual maths. The test is on the 30th of October 2019. It's a two and a half hour long test, just maybe a bit longer than some of the other tests. It's a mix of multiple choice questions and longer questions where you'll need to show you're working out. So your reasoning? This photo marks on the Multiple-Choice section and 60 marks on the longer questions.
It's marked by our graduate students and we got our graduate students into market because they're really good at maths. They're really good at noticing when your method is going to work. So if you do a question in a way that I wasn't expecting, then we've got the graduate students that see to work out how many marks to give you. So there's no one way to see the question that they're really respecting. Any attempt to questions that that will work.
I put lots of pass papers, lots of solutions, average scores for past years, even histograms of different maths score distributions. If you're into that on the website, the only website needs go to, which is Maths Stockstill Act UK slash R slash MIT all lowercase. That's the maths the emissions test website's got. I hope everything you need to know about the maths emission test if anything's missing.
Feel free to email me and suggest most up more stuff I can put on that website. So a little bit about the content. The maths is based on a really limited set of mathematics. I don't know if, even if, even if I know you're taking A-levels, I don't know if you're doing A-level maths and then further maths, or if you're doing both of those at the same time so that the only maths I can assume, you know, even if you're doing A-levels is a single maths.
So if this really limited syllabus based on maths, we expect you to have seen by the 30th October 2019, it's one side of A4 and it's on that website. So if you want to check that you've seen enough maths to do this test, maybe you're sending a different exam board and you want to check that your exam board lines up at least slightly with A-level maths. I can take that one page syllabus on the website and see what maths we make.
We make the questions difficult then, not by asking you about breadth of maths, but testing your depth of understanding. Can you apply these maths topics in unfamiliar situations? If I give you a question, that's a mash up of two different maths topics. Can you work out how to apply both of them? At the same time, you untangle that all of the problems look quite unfamiliar. When you first look at a problem, you won't know what to do. You'll be stuck.
And that's kind of the fundamental state of being a mathematician to be stuck on a maths problem and say, we want to test, can you get unstuck? Can you work out what to do and how to make progress with that maths question? And then once you've thought of a plan, can you actually execute your plan fluently to get through that maths question? I guess the maths missions test these past papers online and an answer as well if you want to try out some, some past ask questions.
I think I also encourage you if you're going to go down the route of practising lots of questions and maths, not the only test out there. There are loads of other maths emissions tests, I won't name them. It actually loads of other great sources of maths questions on on the website.
If you can find other ways to practise being stuck on maths problems, then that's probably good practise for not just a matter of admissions, but good practise for being a mathematician, which is why I'm really interested in. OK, so I've got a list of all the stuff that we used to decide who's make offers to you. So you're put in a UCAS application and we get your previous academic performance from your UCAS application.
We get your predicted grades. We also get a teacher's reference. Your teacher will tell us how keen you are on maths. You all right? A reference. You'll write a personal statement yourself, but tell us how keen you are en masse. We'll have your maths emissions test score, of course, and we use all of that together to decide who to invite to interview.
We're lucky in that we get lots of great applicants and we can shortlist down to about three times as many applicants as we have places for the interview stage. If we're interviewing you, it's because we think we stand a chance of making you an offer. We interested in you from your application and your maths school. We look at that all together. There's no hard cut-off on GCSE use, for example. There's no hard cut-off on on that score.
We we consider everything together. What we advise you to interview, obviously, will have the information from that interview as well, and we use everything together again to decide who to make the offers to. So we won't just use the interview as some sort of final hurdle. We've still got your UCAS application and your Mac school. And in fact, the paper that you wrote on for that for the map have the actual booklet that you write in, as we have really quite a lot of maths information.
I suppose I should say at this stage the stuff not on this slide that we don't use to judge applications. We don't take into consideration things like your extracurricular activities, like if you're really good at karate or the tuba, then we don't take that into consideration. We really try to take the best mathematicians based on maths ability. OK, so here's more information about interviews if you're invited to interview.
This will be in early December, and as said, that we invite about three times as many people as we have places to interview. We would invite more people, but we don't have the resources in early December to invite more people. If you live outside of Europe, then you're probably going to be invited to be interviewed by phone or over the internet through a programme a bit like Skype. If you live in Europe, though, we'll invite you to come to Oxford.
If you've made it to Oxford today, then we'll invite you back for your interview here in December. You'll be accommodated if you come to Oxford at the college that you apply to or the college you were assigned to. If you made an open application and you'll have a chance to meet current undergraduates while you're here. If you come to Oxford, then you'll be interviewed not just by that college that you apply to, but also by a second college.
That's been assigned to you by an algorithm. And that's one of our processes to make sure that you've been seen by two sets of tutors to make sure that we're we're cross comparing and taking the best applicants. OK, so you can expect as a result, at least two entities while you're here in Oxford and those interviews are going to be academic in nature. We can ask you maths questions and find out what happens when I guess you're stuck on maths problems again.
I'm going to give you a quick, hard maths problem, probably because it's no fun watching you do maths problems that you give easily. We can give you a maths problem that you need to think about. And my main advice here is that to talk out loud about what your ideas are during that interview to do maths, but also tell us what you're thinking and tell us what you're doing. Listen to the hints that your interviewers are giving you. We're trying to get you unstuck.
We're trying to give you hints and see how you responds to unfamiliar maths and a little bit of teaching academic in nature. You should expect prompts and hints. We know how to do the question. We're which to help you do the questions and see how you respond to that. And if you're applying for one of those joint degrees, you can expect to be interviewed in both disciplines. Nothing besides you expect questions from each of those disciplines.
OK, so you be interviewed at least once by your First Choice college, usually twice, actually, and then at least once by your second choice college. You give a candidates in Oxford lots of interviews. We know that people tend to be quite nervous in their first interview, but then by the end of that three day period of interviews and people within quite a few interviews and more relaxed and doing better at maths,
we've noticed, OK, that interview process. I should say we use all of this together to decide who's make office do, and we send our offer letters these days, I suppose offer emails in some cases in January, after after the Christmas break, I should say by that point in January, we've essentially made all of our decisions right. We don't we're not in the business of making dramatically more offers than we have places.
We make about as many offers as we have places knowing that almost everyone we meet is obviously going to have no trouble with their A-level or equivalent is just going to start in October. So that's kind of the end of the decision process in January. Here are our standard conditional offers. But as I've said, these these tend to not be much of a hurdle for the people we've made offers to perhaps motivated by having an Oxford offer.
People find that actually they can get a star in maths and they they can get a nice to our investments. That's the standard conditional offer for A-levels for mathematics, statistics and maths and philosophy I saw in maths and further maths and a in any third subject. We've got this system of reduced offers, though, because we know that some schools can't teach for the maths to full A-level or can't teach for the maths at all.
If that's the case for you, then please mention this somewhere on your application. Our standard offer in that case is to base our offer on the maths that you are doing. So if your school doesn't offer advice at all, then we have the capacity to make an offer a a with the star in maths and an eight in two more subjects.
I should say if you're doing four A-levels because you're lucky enough to be at a school that will teach you for four A-levels, and these are still the offers that we'd make on on three subjects, we don't make offers based on four full A-levels. The offer would either be worded to say a sorry maths, a in further maths, a in either of your other two subjects. Or we might pick one of the other two subjects we find it doesn't make much difference which of those we do in practise.
OK, so three three A-levels Iby offer is thirty nine overall, with seven six six higher level four advanced highers two or three, depending on how many your school can teach. Obviously a in mathematics and for maths and computer science that joint on course, it's a little bit different. We're looking for one e-store that's in maths or further maths, but again, the reduced system of offers. If your school can't teach further maths, okay.
But as I've said, when we get to exams, this doesn't prove much of a hurdle for the people we've made offers to almost everyone. We make an offer to you in January starts the course in October. OK, here's some advice very quickly on preparing for this application. I suppose my main bit of advice is to revise the maths that you've already seen before. Look at your A-level maths or equivalent. Look at the maths that you've done already and think about how it joins together.
Think about the connexions between mathematical topics that you've seen. If you've got a favourite bit of maths from school, try and look into it a bit more. There is so much stuff out there on the web now. Wikipedia is quite technical and complicated. There's also Maths World, which is an encyclopaedia of maths and loads of YouTube videos or things recommending ways to to teach yourself a little bit more maths if you're interested in a particular topic.
There's probably more stuff out there that you can find out about to look into. So this is a great time if you're interested in doing a little bit of independent study or research. That's a great skill. I'm not really recommending that just for application, but just for practising. Being a mathematician is looking into things on your own back. You might have a go at some past emissions tests. I hope you also have a go at some some other maths questions as well.
There are things out there like UK, MTV Challenges, British Maths Olympiad Papers, Step four papers, AAA papers and rich website Underground Maths. There's a bunch of them. We don't use any of those in our actual admissions process, but I'm recommending that you have a look at them just because that cool maths problems. And if you think about doing maths for three years, then you might be interested in doing a little bit of maths now.
You might like to arrange a mock interview with a teacher if you can't do a mock interview with a teacher, then perhaps consider talking to a friend about mathematics. I know that's drastically uncool. But if you can find someone who is willing to let you talk to him, talk about mathematics. That's really helpful practise of you explaining the mathematics that you're interested in.
Perhaps they're also preparing for an interview, and they can explain French revolutions or historical studies or something. And then you can tell anyone else that this ever happens. You can also visit our website, which is a master AI expert, Oxford, the academic UK, the United Kingdom, which got loads more details about what you study on our course at the moment. What we're currently offering, it's got a synopsis of all of those courses that I throw up on the screen really quickly.
If you want to find out what you actually do in 30 year fiscus flows and you can check on our website for more details about courses coming up and application details, I suppose as well. Final tips on how to find out more so you could ask questions today. I'll be taking questions in the livestream comments at 10:30. All the lights have just gone off. I'll be taking questions in the livestream comments from 10:30 to 11:30.
I'm going to be taking questions in embryo life after that before the next session is over the lunch break. If you're here in Oxford today, you've got a chance to visit some colleges to find out more about that. And we're back. You got a chance to find out more about colleges. Maybe you visit a college and fall in love with what it looks like. Maybe accommodation would be great. Maybe you'd be really near a cricket pitch and you want to be near the cricket pitch.
Maybe we'll have a couple of ducks in a pond and that'll be just the best thing ever. But I would encourage you to visit some colleges and talk to them about maths. If you're watching on YouTube, then you can email us. Undergraduate admissions master OKC's the UK. You also grab a copy of our prospectus, which you've handed out today. It's also online our slash prospectus. As I've said before, check the website for all the most up to date details.
That's maths, the Oxford Actor UK all for general application details on Oxlade UK slash apply. OK, thanks very much for listening to all that rattling lightning speed took on this going be a minute now to swap over talks as we get ready for Vicky Neil to show you some maths. This is your last chance to leave if you don't want to see any pure maths. If you're watching on the livestream, we'll be back in two minutes. Don't go anywhere. Thank you.