COMS10014 Mathematics A
Welcome to the unit website for COMS10014 Mathematics for Computer Science A in the 2025-26 academic year! All materials that you will need for the unit will be linked to from this page; some links will require you to authenticate with the university’s Microsoft Single Sign-On.
This unit and its companion Mathematics B teach you the basic mathematics that you will need in your Computer Science degree. The topics covered in these units will prepare you for later units in the degree as well as linking to some of the school’s research areas, including algorithms, data science, machine learning, and programming languages. More specifically, the topics for this unit are based around three areas:
- Logic and Proof
- Sets, Functions, and Relations
- Probability
Logic and proof is in some sense the mathematics of how computers work - both at the software level and at the hardware level. This mode of thinking is essential to reasoning about programs, and can be used to prove that a program does what it should do, or to design a program correctly in the first place.
Set, functions, and relation give us the basic mathematical building blocks of many data structures. In this part of the course, you will also look at combinatorics, i.e. the mathematic of counting, which serves as a key foundation for much of algorithms and probability.
Finally, we will look at probability - the way in which we model an unpredictable, chaotic world of which we have complete and accurate knowledge. The material you learn here is also a foundation for machine learning.