The questions how to maximise your gain (or to minimise the cost) and how to determine the optimal strategy/policy are fundamental for an engineer, an economist, a doctor designing a cancer therapy, or a government planning some social policies. Many problems in mechanics, physics, neuroscience and biology can be formulated as optimistion problems. Therefore, optimisation theory is an indispensable tool for an applied mathematician. Optimisation theory has many diverse applications and requires a wide range of tools but there are only a few ideas underpinning all this diversity of methods and applications. This course will focus on two of them. We will learn how the concept of convexity and the concept of dynamic programming provide a unified approach to a large number of seemingly unrelated problems. By completing this unit you will learn how to formulate optimisation problems that arise in science, economics and engineering and to use the concepts of convexity and the dynamic programming principle to solve straight forward examples of such problems. You will also learn about important classes of optimisation problems arising in finance, economics, engineering and insurance.
Unit details and rules
Academic unit | Mathematics and Statistics Academic Operations |
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Credit points | 6 |
Prerequisites
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A mark of 65 or above in 12cp from (MATH2XXX or STAT2XXX or DATA2X02) |
Corequisites
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None |
Prohibitions
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MATH4071 |
Assumed knowledge
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MATH2X21 and MATH2X23 and STAT2X11 |
Available to study abroad and exchange students | Yes |
Teaching staff
Coordinator | Ben Goldys, beniamin.goldys@sydney.edu.au |
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Lecturer(s) | Ben Goldys, beniamin.goldys@sydney.edu.au |