MATH3560 is a Mathematics Level III course. See the course overview below.

Units of credit: 3

Prerequisites: 6 units of credit in Level II Mathematics courses

Cycle of offering: yearly in Semester 1.

Graduate attributes: the course will enhance your research, inquiry and analytical thinking abilities.

More information: this recent course handout (pdf) contains information about course objectives, assessment, course materials and the syllabus.

The Online Handbook entry contains up-to-date timetabling information.

If you are currently enrolled in MATH3560, you can log into the My eLearning Vista instance of this course.

Why were the ancient Greeks so obsessed with geometry? The answer is surprisingly deep and philosophical. A look at Greek mathematics is not what you might think - not a tedious tale of of things we learned in early high school but a venture into a view of mathematics which is radically different from our own and dominated mathematics for more than a thousand years. It was not until Descartes in the 17th century that mathematicians escaped from the restriction imposed by the Greek insistence on `homogeneity' in equations. While we may see some aspects of Greek mathematics as hang-ups, we marvel at their invention of the logical and axiomatic methods we use today and at the ingenuity of Archimedes in finding volumes and centres of gravity without the aid of multiple integrals.

Apart from the ancient Greeks, the other period that we study closely is the time when the ideas of calculus gradually emerged, were established on a sound footing by Newton and Leibnitz and quickly applied to a multitude of problems by such great mathematicians as the Bernoulli brothers, Euler, Lagrange and Laplace. We look at actual texts from the time and learn to recognize familiar ideas and techniques when they are expressed in different language or in a rudimentary form.