Sessions

The material in this unit is organised into 20 sessions, 10 each for Logic and Proof, and Combinatorics and Probability.

As far as possible, all the unit materials (except solutions to worksheets, and class tests) will be available from the start of term.

Lecture and Notes

For each session, you start by learning new material provided by

• a lecture, that you attend at a fixed time
• lecture notes, that you read in your own time.

It is your own choice if you read the notes before or after the lecture, but you are expected to both attend the lecture and read the notes for each session. Sometimes, the notes will elaborate on something I do not mention in the lecture, or I might answer a question in the lecture that was not in the notes.

I give lectures on boards, writing with pen or chalk depending on the room set-up. This is a very different style than Powerpoint presentations, but is generally considered the right way to do mathematics across most good universities in the world (outside of pandemic lockdowns).

Our lecture recording systems are not set up to record this kind of lecture properly - the cameras in some rooms do not have the correct resolution to capture all boards, for example - so you should assume that for practical purposes, there are no usable lecture recordings. This is allowed in our university, and on this unit, you will have lecture notes available too. But, you should take your own notes in the lectures where possible, and of course catch up in your own time on any lectures you missed for a good reason.

Comprehension Questions

After each lecture and notes, there will be a sheet of short comprehension questions that you should answer in your own time. You will get the solutions to these questions at the same time as the question sheets.

The idea of these questions is that if you have understood the material in the lecture, then answering the comprehension questions will be both quick and easy. If anything is not clear to you about these questions, you should ask a teaching assistant in the following workshop.

You should do the comprehension questions for each session after attending the lecture and reading the notes, but before attending the workshop.

Workshops

Each session has a two-hour workshop (though 3 out of 20 workshops are class tests). During these workshops, you will work in groups to solve worksheets which generally contain more complex questions than the comprehension questions.

At the start of each workshop, I will usually have some announcements or updates. After this, if you have any questions about the lecture material or the comprehension questions, you will have an opportunity to sit down with a teaching assistant, and usually an area of the room will be indicated for students with questions. Afterwards, you can work on the worksheets. If you have no questions at the start of a worksheet, you can sit down at a table with other students and start, as a group, working on the worksheet directly. The teaching assistants will spend the rest of the workshop helping groups with the worksheets.

Answers to the worksheets will appear a few days after the workshop. There are arguments both for and against doing things this way, but for this unit, this is the pattern we are working with.

Class Tests

Three workshops will be class tests - exact dates will be announced with enough time to prepare for each one. Class tests do not count towards your grade for the unit, but attending them (even if you do badly on the test) counts for the attendance hurdle just like other workshops.

For the class tests, in the first hour you solve some questions under semi-exam conditions (e.g. individually, no talking). In the second hour we will go through the solutions together.

The class tests are opportunities for all of the following:

• practicing and assessing your own mathematical knowledge
• practicing the format of the exam (class tests use the same style of answer sheets)
• experiencing the kind of questions that could come up in an exam.

Individual Study

Outside the contact hours, you are expected to study and revise in your own time. See the page on studying for more information.

On average, you should reckon with 4 hours of individual study time per session. This includes reading the lecture notes, going over your own notes from the lecture, solving the comprehension questions and checking the solutions, finishing any questions on the worksheets that you did not get through in the workshop, checking your solutions against the sample solutions when they come out, looking up anything you do not understand yet in textbooks or online, and revising material with your favourite system, for upcoming class tests and the exam.