Colchester is a Roman town with a castle and excellent shops. It is located close to the picturesque countryside made famous by the artist John Constable. It is a 50-minute train ride from London and equally close to Stansted airport. The Department of Mathematics provides facilities for research and postgraduate training in probability, statistics and operational research leading to an appropriate qualification. The department has a network of modern PCs and SUN, DEC and IBM workstations with network access to the central university servers.
Collaborative work is undertaken with many other departments.
Support may be available from a research council for doctoral students. For the 2000-2001 academic year the statistics and OR lecture courses will include statistical computing, experimental design, simulation, Markov chains, panel data analysis, applications of data analysis, computational methods of operational research, and combinatorial optimisation and a variety of econometrics courses. Other computer science courses include machine learning and data mining, adaptive systems, simulation and distributed systems, constraint satisfaction and genetic algorithms and various courses on databases. The selection of courses will depend on a candidate's prior knowledge. It is hoped that an MSc in Statistics and Econometrics will be available from 2001.