Three down, one to go
Well, had the old double-whammy yesterday and overall it was a bit disappointing.
Started with Introduction to Topology in the morning. As soon as I turned over the paper and read the first question, I knew that something had been drastically changed. I’ve done the past five years’ worth of papers, and, apart from one year which was done with a different lecturer, the format of the paper hasn’t changed at all. Basically the format is topologies, compactness/connectedness, identification maps/quotient spaces, the fundamental group and finally surfaces.
This year, the overall format was the “same”, but the standard of question was much harder. It came as somewhat of a shock to the system, but I don’t think I’ve done that badly. Amazingly, read the proof of Lebesgue’s lemma, and it came up on the exam. Unfortunately I completely forgot the proof and couldn’t answer in there. Oh well. Somewhat annoying was the lack of any “give without proof examples of…” question which would have been extremely useful. Overall though, I’m hopeful of a mark in the 70–80% region.
Combinatorics was, unfortunately, somewhat of a different story. I (barely) answered 4 questions worth of material, and I think that overall I’ll be quite lucky to get around 50% of the marks, tops. Mostly because I made all of it up. Hopefully there’ll be a certain degree of moderation as I think everybody found the exam quite hard. The annoying thing was the presence of probability stuff in not one, but two of the questions which I found extremely annoying – after all, I have pretty much no knowledge of anything to do with statistics at all.
So we’ll see. One last exam on Monday before three more weeks of revision, and then the second lot starts. But before that, the joy of Measure Theory. That could be very interesting.