Further Mathematics is designed to broaden the mathematical experiences of students and can only be taken if Mathematics has also been chosen as an option. As in the Mathematics GCE course, a mixture of pure mathematics units and applications units will be studied. In the pure mathematics units the concepts and methods studied in the mathematics course will be developed further, in addition new and exciting areas of pure mathematics will be introduced: complex numbers and matrices. These areas of the course give students the opportunity to develop some of the more abstract concepts of mathematics. The applications units cover further study of mechanics and statistics.

The course, in addition to the mathematics course, will require students to

• further construct mathematical arguments and examples

• understand mathematical language, syntax, symbols associated with set theory, facts, concepts and techniques

• further comprehend and critique mathematical arguments, proofs and justifications

• extract an underlying mathematical structure from a context and solve problems presented in an unstructured format

• apply principles of the problem-solving cycle: specify the problem, collect information, process and represent information and interpret results

• create a mathematical model based on a situation given

• use the model to: explore situations further, interpret outputs and refine the original model