Mathematics with Foundation Year
Mathematics is one of the most powerful and versatile intellectual disciplines available at university level. It trains you to think with rigour and precision, to construct proofs and arguments that follow necessarily from their premises, and to recognise the mathematical structures that underlie apparently disparate phenomena across science, economics, engineering, and everyday life. Pure mathematics develops this capacity for its own sake, pursuing truth through logic alone; applied mathematics directs it at models of the real world; statistics provides the tools for reasoning about uncertainty and extracting knowledge from data.
A mathematics degree gives you all three.
At Plymouth this four-year full-time programme includes a foundation year, which gives you a preparatory stage to build the mathematical foundations you need before entering the main degree. Whether you are coming with a non-standard background or simply want to consolidate your knowledge before tackling degree-level mathematics, the foundation year provides the grounding that allows you to engage fully with what follows. The programme takes advantage of the role of computing in modern mathematics, giving you skills in programming and high-performance computation that are directly applicable to how mathematics is actually done today, both in academic research and in industry.
You will study analysis, algebra, calculus, differential equations, and statistics alongside the computational tools that extend what mathematics can achieve in practical contexts. Real-world applications are woven throughout, demonstrating how the abstract structures of mathematics connect to the problems scientists, engineers, and data analysts work on every day.
Graduates pursue careers in finance, data science, actuarial work, engineering, research, teaching, software development, cryptography, and the civil service. Mathematics is consistently among the degrees most highly regarded by employers across the most competitive graduate schemes. Many graduates also go on to postgraduate study in mathematics, statistics, or related quantitative disciplines.