Welcome

Welcome to our FutureLearn course on preparing for further study in Mathematics.

We are Mathematics teachers at The Manchester Grammar School.

Andrew has a BSc and MSc in Mathematics and spent three years researching Functional Analysis at Sheffield University. He has held two research bursaries with the Millennium Mathematics Project at Cambridge University developing online learning and has presented at conferences including the Second International Conference on Mathematics Enrichment Through Technology. He has taught for thirty years and his particular interests in Mathematics are Analysis and Logic. In teaching he is involved in the use of technology in the classroom and developing A-level study techniques.

David obtained a PhD in Pure Mathematics in 2014, in Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems; titled “On the fine structure of dynamically defined invariant graphs”. He has taught Mathematics for eight years. His main interests are in fractal geometry and introducing the applications of pure mathematics to students at an early age.

Mathematics has a reasonable claim to be the biggest and oldest continuously studied academic subject in the world. It permeates every part of our lives – finance, science, technology all depend on it, and yet many people have only a fairly vague grasp of what professional Mathematicians actually do.

In this course, we hope to show a little of the breadth of Mathematics as a subject, and to help you see some of the different areas that are not always obvious from the point of view of school-based study. Hopefully this will enthuse some people to study Mathematics at University or even pursue it as a career.

Please do realise that reading Mathematics is not the same as reading a novel. It may well take you longer to go through a relatively short piece of Mathematics – this is not a problem! Take your time and think about where the work is taking you. Be prepared to pass over some of the details when you read it for the first time. Once you have understood the broad outline you can always go back and fill in the gaps!