Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications – (M.Sc.)

The University of Essex is one of the UK's leading academic institutions, ranked ninth nationally for research excellence following the most recent Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).

Discrete mathematics underlies several vital situations in practical life: the frequency assignment problem for communication networks (what keeps your mobile telephone working) is a special case of the ‘theoretical’ graph colouring problem; the RSA cryptosystem, used on computers all over the world, depends at bottom on classical results of number theory; game theory, with roots in mathematics, statistics and economics, is routinely applied to understanding and predicting human behaviour; problems of protection of digital information against piracy are closely related to aspects of set systems.

Our MSc Discrete Mathematics and its Applications covers many aspects of discrete mathematics and their potential use in practice. The importance of this area was emphasised in the recent International Review of Mathematics in the UK but our course also provides you with options in optimisation, machine learning/data mining and statistics. Key employment skills you gain include analytic reasoning, problem solving, techniques of discrete mathematics and an understanding of application areas of these techniques, algorithm design and implementation, and data analysis.