phd in mathematics ucla

General Catalog

Mathematics ma, cphil, phd.

Grad Development

Admissions Requirements for the Graduate Major in Mathematics

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graduate courses

Course descriptions.

These descriptions reflect the official program requirements for the MA and PhD in mathematics and are the official word on the acceptability of a course for degree credit.

General Course Outline

Catalog Description

Prerequisite: bachelor’s degree in mathematics or equivalent. Designed for students in mathematics/education program. Important ideas of algebra, geometry, and calculus leading effectively from elementary to modern mathematics. Approaches to number system, point sets, geometric interpretations of algebra and analysis, integration, differentiation, series and analytic functions. May not be applied toward M.A. degree requirements.

Prerequisite: bachelor’s degree in mathematics or equivalent. Designed for students in mathematics/education program. Development of mathematical theories describing various empirical situations. Basic characterizing postulates; development of a logical structure of theorems. Modern topics such as operations research, linear programming, game theory, learning models, models in social and life sciences. May not be applied toward M.A. degree requirements.

Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Rigorous treatment of fundamental results of analysis. Applications to contemporary research. Preparation for analysis portion of UCLA Mathematics Basic Examination that is required of M.A. and Ph.D. students. S/U or letter grading.

Lecture, three hours. Requisites: courses 210A, 246A. Algebraic number theory, including ideal theory, valuations, local fields, cyclotomic fields. Introduction to class-field theory, analytic number theory, L-functions and class number formulas, and modular forms. S/U or letter grading.

Generating functions. Probabilistic methods. Polya theorem. Enumerative graph theory. Partition theory. Number theoretical applications. Structure of graphs, matching theory, duality theorems. Packings, pavings, coverings, statistical designs, difference sets, triple systems, finite planes. Configurations, polyhedra. Ramsey theory, finite and transfinite, and applications.

Lecture, three hours. Adelic analysis on GL(1) and GL(2), especially Tate thesis and Hecke theory, automorphic representations. Special values of L-functions and p-adic L-functions, arithmetic theory of modular forms, advanced topics in analytic number theory. Arithmetic geometry, especially of modular curves. S/U or letter grading.

(Same as Computer Science M283A.) Lecture, three hours. Basic number theory, including congruences and prime numbers. Cryptography: public-key and discrete log cryptosystems. Attacks on cryptosystems. Primality testing and factorization methods. Elliptic curve methods. Topics from coding theory: Hamming codes, cyclic codes, Gilbert/Varshamov bounds, Shannon theorem. S/U or letter grading.

(Same as Computer Science M282A.) Lecture, four hours; outside study, eight hours. Introduction to theory of cryptography, stressing rigorous definitions and proofs of security. Topics include notions of hardness, one-way functions, hard-core bits, pseudorandom generators, pseudorandom functions and pseudorandom permutations, semantic security, public-key and private-key encryption, secret-sharing, message authentication, digital signatures, interactive proofs, zero-knowledge proofs, collision-resistant hash functions, commitment protocols, key-agreement, contract signing, and two-party secure computation with static security. Letter grading.

(Same as Computer Science M282B.) Lecture, four hours. Requisite: course M209A. Consideration of advanced cryptographic protocol design and analysis. Topics include noninteractive zero-knowledge proofs; zero-knowledge arguments; concurrent and non-black-box zero-knowledge; IP=PSPACE proof, stronger notions of security for public-key encryption, including chosen-ciphertext security; secure multiparty computation; dealing with dynamic adversary; nonmalleability and composability of secure protocols; software protection; threshold cryptography; identity-based cryptography; private information retrieval; protection against man-in-middle attacks; voting protocols; identification protocols; digital cash schemes; lower bounds on use of cryptographic primitives, software obfuscation. May be repeated for credit with topic change. Letter grading.

Requisites: courses 110A, 110B, 110C. Students with credit for courses 110B and/or 110C cannot receive M.A. degree credit for courses 210B and/or 210C. Group theory, including theorems of Sylow and Jordan/Holder/Schreier; rings and ideals, factorization theory in integral domains, modules over principal ideal rings, Galois theory of fields, multilinear algebra, structure of algebras.

This course is also a preparation to the Algebra Qualifying Exam.

Requisite: course 210A. Radical, irreducible modules and primitive rings, rings and algebras with minimum condition.

(4) Lecture, three hours. Enforced requisite: course 210A. Modules over rings, homomorphisms and tensor products of modules, functors and derived functors, homological dimension of rings and modules. S/U or letter grading.

(4) Lecture, three hours. Requisites: courses 210A, 210B, 210C, 212A. Advanced topics in modern homological algebra, such as triangulated categories, differential graded algebras as dg-categories, tilting theory and applications of group cohomology to representation theory, stable categories and modular representation theory, and other current topics. S/U or letter grading.

Requisite: course 210A. Topics include representation theory, transfer theory, infinite Abelian groups, free products and presentations of groups, solvable and nilpotent groups, classical groups, algebraic groups.

Requisite: course 215A (or 210ABC with permission of instructor). Affine and projective varieties. Irreducibility, dimension, singular and smooth points. Rational maps, curves, intersections in projective space. Schemes. Proper and finite morphisms. Coherent and quasi-coherent sheaves. Divisors, line bundles, ampleness.

Requisite: course 214A. Sheaf cohomology. Cohomology of coherent sheaves. Flat morphisms, smooth morphisms. The Riemann-Roch theorem for curves. Projective embeddings of curves, elliptic curves, canonical embedding. Introduction to birational geometry in higher dimensions.

Prerequisite: course 210A or consent of instructor. Topics from commutative ring theory, including techniques of localization, prime ideal structure in commutative Noetherian rings, principal ideal theorem, Dedekind rings, modules, projective modules, Serre conjecture, regular local rings.

(Formerly numbered 216.) Lecture, three hours. Requisites: courses 210A, 210B, 210C. Closer examination of areas of current research in algebra, including algebraic geometry and K-theory. Variable content may include Abelian varieties, invariant theory, Hodge theory, geometry over finite fields, K-theory, homotopical algebra, and derived algebraic geometry. May be repeated for credit by petition. S/U or letter grading.

(Same as Physics M236.) Lecture, three hours. Interdisciplinary course on topics at interface between physics quantum fields and superstrings and mathematics of differential and algebraic geometry. Topics include supersymmetry, Seiberg/Witten theory, conformal field theory, Calabi/Yau manifolds, mirror symmetry and duality, integrable systems. S/U grading.

All graduate students who want to TA at UCLA are required to participate in university and departmental TA Training Programs no later than the first quarter in which any TA work is done. In the department of mathematics both programs are offered only in the fall quarter. Therefor they must be taken in the fall of any year in which a graduate students is going to be given a TA-ship. Departmental TA Training requires attendance at a two-day training session prior to the beginning of Fall quarter and participation and enrollment in Math 495, which meets weekly during the Fall. Students who have prior experience TAing at other universities are not exempted from this requirement. Students should consult the Graduate Advisor to sign up for departmental training.