MAST90067: Advanced Methods: Transforms

Two assignments worth 20% each, one 3 hour exam worth 60%

This is my favourite university subject. The course is taught by a mathematical physicist, thus, he'll try invoke physics into as many lectures as possible. The subject starts off by looking at Lagrangian mechanics and then goes on to calculus of variations where you do all kinds of cool stuff with functionals. The subject also goes over the contour integration you would have learnt in Complex Analysis and extends that so you can do more advanced (and much cooler) contour integration. The subject then revisits Fourier and Laplace transforms, which were taught in Partial Differential Equations, but now that more advanced contour integral techniques have been taught, you get to do a couple of transforms by hand. The next part is asymptotic expansion of integrals, in this section you are taught techniques to approximate a difficult integral using methods such as Watson's Lemma, Laplace's method, method of stationary phase and method of steepest descents. Finally the subject finishes off by looking at generalised functions and Green's functions.
My advice is to stay on top of the questions assigned because you learn techniques that can't be learn't in a lecture and he actually threw in a question from the problem set into the exam.

No

Paul Pearce

No

5/5

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24 one hour lectures, 12 one hour practice classes.

2012, Semester 2

H2B [74]