Core Courses

There are two core courses in mathematical methods and students must attend both. These core courses are:

• A1 Applied Partial Differential Equations (Professor Peter Howell, Michaelmas term), synopsis
• A2 Perturbation Methods (Professor Ruth Baker, Hilary term), synopsis

There are three core courses in numerical analysis and students must take two of these for assessment. Students may take the third course if they wish. The numerical analysis core courses are:

• B1 Numerical Solution of Partial Differential Equations (Professor Endre Süli, Michaelmas term), synopsis
• B2 Numerical Linear Algebra (Professor Yuji Nakatsukasa, Michaelmas term), synopsis
• B3 Continuous Optimisation (Professor Raphael Hauser and Dr Casey Garner, Hilary term), synposis

All core courses consist of 16 lectures and four 90 minute examples classes, and students must attend all of these. Past papers and solutions for all these courses are available to use for revision. Recent MMSC past exam papers and solutions also provide a good source of revision questions for some of the core courses, but note that the exam structure changes for exams in 2027. In addition, older past exam papers can be found on the SOLO website.