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It's now a year since I started studying again, part-time, towards a BSc. I last updated the public about six months ago, so here's the latest for those very few readers that may be interested!

Back in September of last year, I started studying part-time, for a BSc in Maths, with some computing thrown in. It's now six months since I made that first post, and this is a really, really busy phase of the degree course, so I thought it might be time for an update.

I'm just over a quarter of the way through MST121: Using Mathematics, which I started back in September. My impression is that it's starting to get tougher, but it may just be that my mind has been elsewhere.

One concept with which I found myself to be less confident is Sigma Notation. The principle itself is fairly straightforward (it's kind of like a for loop, if you ask me) but getting actual numbers out of the other side was another matter.

The problem was that I was consistently failing to spot the patterns that indicate that you can substitute in other, hopefully simpler, expressions. So I made a little aide memoire to print out. It covers the three four initial, erm, refactorings that have cropped up, and I figured I may as well share it.

So it turns out that as of now, I'm once again a student, this time with the Open University.

Strictly speaking, the course kicks off this coming Saturday, but since I'll be in the pub from lunchtime onwards that day, and since they sent all the materials through a couple of weeks ago, I felt it might be worth cracking on.