The Department of Mathematics offers about fifty undergraduate courses each semester, broken into approximately four hundred sections. The diversity and richness of this selection, matched by only a small number of U.S. colleges and universities, is an enormous asset for students interested in the mathematical sciences. The Department includes about sixty tenured and tenure-track faculty members and thirty teaching-focused faculty with interests ranging over all areas of mathematics.
The undergraduate program in mathematics has a major service role in helping students fulfill requirements in other academic disciplines. Substantial amounts of mathematics are required of students majoring in a wide variety of disciplines, including engineering, business, and the social, biological, and physical sciences. Moreover, most students must fulfill a mathematics requirement for graduation.
The Department of Mathematics also has a rigorous program for a major in mathematics, and graduates about one hundred and fifty majors each year in three different curriculum codes.
Over twenty-two thousand students enroll each year in undergraduate mathematics courses during the fall, spring, and summer terms at Rutgers.
About the Undergraduate Program
The Undergraduate Program in Mathematics offers a broad variety of courses serving the needs of students in all majors, with courses designed for all students of liberal arts, as well as more technical majors ranging from accounting and pharmacy through the mathematical sciences and Mathematics (pure or applied) itself.
For Liberal Arts students we offer a course (Math 103) in which mathematical ideas, many of them quite recently developed, are applied to matters of general concern such as issues of apportionment in politics, or (for the more artistically inclined) the nature of symmetry.
Many students in more technical majors, from Pharmacy and Business to Physics, take one of the two flavors of our calculus sequences, either the more specialized—and more extensive—sequence beginning with 151 for those in the mathematical sciences, or the sequence beginning with 135 for the less mathematically intensive majors.
For mathematics majors and minors, we offer a program designed to cultivate both technical skills and a conceptual grasp of the underlying theory. In addition to the basic requirements, mathematics majors and minors can choose from a wide array of course electives and specialized options. Students in combined 5-year programs may also earn a Masters Degree with one additional year of study. Interdisciplinary programs (Stat/Math and Biomath) are also offered.
Courses
Students in a wide variety of majors take all or part of one of our two calculus sequences, which begin with Math 135 or 151, often in combination with our introductory Linear Algebra course, Math 250. Many non-majors also take advanced courses in mathematics with applications in engineering, physics, biology, economics, actuarial science, computer science, psychology, and other disciplines. We offer precalculus either as a single semester course (Math 115) or over two terms (Math 111-112); and we also have courses in college algebra for students who need preparation before taking either precalculus or Math for Liberal Arts (Math 103). We also have a variety of courses suitable for future elementary school teachers at the 100 level. The bridge between the more computational courses at the 100/200 level and the more advanced 300/400 level courses is provided by Math 300, Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning, which is a prerequisite for many of our advanced courses.
