# MA20216: Algebra 2A

## Welcome

This is the home page of MA20216: Algebra 2A taught by Fran Burstall.

## The story so far

I keep a diary of what I covered in lectures. There is also an official syllabus and a reading list.

Here is the timetable. I shall lecture at least 5 times every 2 weeks and have a problem class whenever it seems like a good idea

## Exercise sheets

Exercise sheets will be issued weekly on Fridays and homework should be handed a week later after which solutions will be available here.

• Exercise sheet 1 with solutions as PDF.
• Exercise sheet 2 with solutions as PDF.
• Exercise sheet 3 with solutions as PDF.
• Exercise sheet 4 with solutions as PDF.
• Exercise sheet 5 with solutions as PDF.
• Exercise sheet 6 with solutions as PDF.
• Exercise sheet 7 with solutions as PDF.
• Exercise sheet 8 with solutions as PDF.
• Exercise sheet 9 with solutions as PDF.
• Exercise sheet 10 with solutions as PDF.

## Lecture notes

By public demand but with serious misgivings, I am making typeset notes available.

WARNING: these are not a substitute for taking your own careful notes during lectures. In particular, these notes are a work in progress and will certainly contain many mistakes (if you find any, report them to me!).

• The entire course. Last updated: 16:14, Saturday, January 5 2019.
• Log of recent corrections and additions to the notes.
• Course outline: all the theorems and definitions from the course (auto-generated from the course notes).

## Panopto

Look here for recordings of lectures.

## Forums

There are two forums on moodle associated to this unit where you can ask me questions (equally, you can just send me an email):

• Discussion forum: for maths questions around the course material and exercise sheets.
• Queries forum: for questions about the administration of the course.

You can unsubscribe to either forum if they do not interest you.

## Assessment

This unit is assessed 100% by exam. Generic exam feedback will be available early in the spring. Individual exam feedback will be offered after the marks come out.

### Past papers

In 2017–18, two things happened: I took over the course and changed its focus somewhat and the format of year 2 exams changed to the present section A/B format. So there are only two past papers that really give a good approximation to the real thing:

That said, past papers from previous years (available from the library) are still a good revision aid with the following caveats:
1. The format is different: the rubric was to answer three questions out of four. There was no section A or B.
2. The questions are a bit longer.
3. There are questions on things we did not cover:
• Tensor products: avoid sub-questions with $\otimes$ in them, such as Q4(a) on the 2015/6 exam.
• Free vector spaces: avoid sub-questions with things like $\mathbb{F}_{\mathcal{I}}$ in them, such as Q1 on the 2016/7 exam.

## Other things to read

• Some nice slides showing the Singular Value Decomposition in action for image compression.

## Feedback

I welcome feedback in the form of constructive comments or criticism.

### Problems with this site?

If you encounter any problems while using this site, send me mail describing as completely as you can what has gone wrong.

Fran Burstall <feb@bath.ac.uk>
Last modified: Mon Jan 14 08:13:28 GMT 2019