MATH5505: Combinatorics

- 3 x Assignments - 20%
- Open-book final exam - 40%

Formal prerequisite is 24 UoC of Level 3 mathematics courses, but it can be wavered by permission from the lecturer. Having said that, MATH1081 is seriously strongly recommended as this course builds directly on it. MATH5425 is a recommended co-requisite.

This is one of many courses offered in postgraduate pure mathematics studies and is typically offered once every 2 years.

Combinatorics is, from what I've been able to see, quite a unique and beautiful part of maths. Questions like "how many ways can we do something" and "what is the least/most amount of things we require for something" can seem quite elementary, but in practice actually requires deep thought. Yet these thoughts can be turned into seriously amazing proofs and results. It also helped me think algorithmically, which is good because I'm now in computer science.

I took on a gamble and subbed out one of my 3rd year electives for this postgrad course. The fact that I still came out with HD despite being carried the entire semester makes me pretty satisfied with it.

The course is taught somewhat differently to most traditional teaching methods. Lectures are more or less used to present amazing (although mindnumbing) proofs of pretty challenging results. The course's difficulty goes down as the semester progresses (the hard stuff is blasted out of the way first). No tutorials and problem sets are released; your thinking during the semester is mostly through the assignments. Assignments involve very proof-based questions and challenge you quite heavily, although sometimes you can do some research and then source a solution you found online. Final exam was very fair; half of it involves essentially free marks whilst the other half are somewhat lighter difficulty proofs. I couldn't get out every question on the exam but I found I was able to get at least halfway with almost all of them.

Thomas Britz was my supervisor for my summer research project, and also the lecturer for this course. As always, he's one of the nicest lecturers in arguably the entire university. Won't talk too much about why here though

This is perhaps the most theoretical course I've done at uni so far. Definitely challenged me a lot more than what I ever had thus far. Which is to be expected for a postgrad level course really, but it was ultimately a fun one.

3 hours of lecture per week (1 x 2hr, 1 x 1hr)

4/5 (somewhat skewed - its difficulty could be as low as 1/5 for an actual honours/postgrad student)

Yes

Dr. Thomas Britz

Lecture notes and lecture slides released. (Also Facebook group.) Although no past papers

4.5/5

N/A

18 s1

88 HD