Notes on Tripos courses

The following are major changes that have taken place to the undergraduate Mathematical Tripos courses in the past few years. This does not include minor adjustments to the schedules. The definitive source of current information on the Mathematical Tripos courses is the Course Information page on the Faculty of Mathematics website. All the extra information given here is publicly available on maths.cam.ac.uk or in the online Cambridge University Reporter archive depending on age; records before 1997–98 are only available in dead tree format.

Lecturers

Information on the lecturers for each year lives in this Google Sheet (IA is complete, based on all online information; the other two Parts go back to 2009–10 and 2010–11. If you would find it useful to have the other years, I would be interested to hear. The Part II sheet is transposed due to the large number of Part II courses. If you prefer one format over the other, I would be interested to hear your reasons, and would consider reformatting the rest of the sheets to be consistent.)

Part IA

The IA course has been stable for a decade now. The last major changes were

• For the first time in 2008–09, the IB course Special Relativity was incorporated into the Dynamics course, to form Dynamics and Relativity.
• Before 2007–08, Vectors and Matrices and Groups were one course taught by two lecturers, called Algebra and Geometry.

Part IB

Is generally stable, but underwent two significant changes in 2019–20.

• Starting in 2019–20, Geometry is now a 24-lecture course with quite a different schedule from the previous 16-lecture course of the same name it replaced.
• Starting in 2019–20, the 24-lecture course Analysis and Topology replaced the 24-lecture Analysis II and the 12-lecture Easter course Metric and Topological Spaces. (This required some material to be removed, inevitably.)
• Variational Principles was created from some of the material in the Methods course (replaced by more complicated results about the Method of Characteristics and Green’s functions in several dimensions), and first lectured in 2009–10
• The 8-lecture Special Relativity course was last taught in 2008–09, after which it was incorporated into IA.

Part II

Some courses change whether they are in Lent or Michaelmas; we do not note this since it is probably not useful to the current generation. Changes are rather more frequent in the third year courses, although generally courses are discontinued and created rather than having their contents permuted.

• Mathematics of Machine Learning was first lectured in 2019–20.
• Quantum Information and Computing was first lectured in 2017–18.
• Analysis of Functions was first lectured in 2016–17.
• Automata and Formal Languages was first lectured in 2015–16.
• Dynamical Systems switched from C to D in 2014–15.
• Optimisation and Control was last lectured in 2017–18.
• Partial Differential Equations was last lectured in 2014–15.
• Geometry of Groups was last lectured in 2013–14.
• General Relativity expanded from 16 to 24 lectures in 2011–12.