What is E600?
The University of Mannheim welcomes students with a great variety of backgrounds every year. To help students from other fields and universities adjust to the strong quantitative focus of our program, and to provide an opportunity to review and refresh knowledge of central concepts, we offer this module called “E600 Mathematics” to prospective students.
The module consists of two parts: a series of block seminar sessions during the two weeks preceeding the lecture period (see below), and the online course you can find on this webpage. The resources are highly complementary and cover roughly the same content. While the classroom sessions expose students to all topics in a fairly short amount of time and thereby provide the opportunity to build some broad familiarity with all key mathematical concepts of the economics MSc program, the online course allows to dig deeper and supports the seminar by collecting all relevant material.
Course Format
We usually offer a series of block seminar sessions during the two weeks preceeding the lecture period. During this time, we will hold an introductory session and 7 block meetings from 8:30 am – 1:00 pm; days and afternoons in between are left free for review and exercise, and some mental regeneration.
2023 course format: For a summary, see the schedule available here. We will have online classes on Zoom during the first week (21 – 25 Aug) and hybrid (on-campus and digitally live) lectures and exercise sessions in the second week (28 – 31 Aug). The closing session on 1 September will be online only.
What do I need to do for E600?
The good news first: you don’t need to do anything. There is no exam, nor can you “fail” this class in any way – it is purely meant to offer training in mathematics according to your individual needs. That being said, you will make your life during the MSc much easier by anything you take away from E600.
We expect that you are, to some degree, already able to deal with basic mathematical expressions and fundamental concepts (e.g. functions, sets) in a formal way. Therefore, you should read the online course’s introductory chapter, Chapter 0: Fundamentals of Mathematics, before coming to the first classroom session.
Second, please take the time to read the “contents and take-aways” for every chapter of the online course (accessible here) before the first meeting. This will help you assess your level of knowledge, and how much effort you should invest in certain topics relative to others.
For the block seminars, you should read the 5 online chapters and prepare the homework exercises. Note that the companion script goes beyond the online chapters. I expect only that you read the online chapters. I included what I think is a reasonable schedule to complete these materials in the course schedule.
Note that there are additional materials on this website. What you explicitly do not need to do is worry about how much material there is, and how much of it may be new to you. You are not supposed to master all the course’s contents by the time the regular MSc courses starts.