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View Full Version : Maths Graduate Programmes in Scandinavia (in english).


MathematicalPhysicist
Jul5-08, 11:55 AM
So far Iv'e looked at websites of departments of helsinki university in finland, upsalla university in sweden and oslo university in norway.
But from the outlook of those websites it wasn't clear to me if the courses are unanimously given in english or just partly.

The worst of the three websites is of oslo university, I can't seem to find further information in english on the research and the courses syllabus etc.

f95toli
Jul5-08, 02:52 PM
Send them an e-mail and ask.
However, I can't imagine them NOT being given in English since there tend to be quite few foreign students in graduate programs (and EVERYONE at a university speaks English).
You would certainly not have a problem in Uppsala.
Oslo University *might* be an exception (although I doubt it); they have all sorts of rules and regulations when it comes to their language(s) in Norway but I don't think that extends to the universities, although it would explain your problem with their website.

eof
Jul8-08, 10:25 AM
I'm a graduate student at uni of helsinki. What I can tell practically every upper level graduate course is given in english if the lecturer feels that his English is good enough and there's an exchange student in the audience (there are usually about 10 people or less on these courses).

Also the Finnish system doesn't really provide you many courses. You're going to have taken pretty much every non-trivial course in a year and after that you pretty much work on your own with your advisor. Courses that would be given in the US as first-year graduate course sequences is pretty much stuff that you have to read on your own. Well there are basic courses in measure theory (skips Radon-Nikodym's proof though), topology, algebraic topology, algebra (doesn't use categorical language), but they would account for about a half of the stuff in a better US grad schools first-year sequence (with easier exercises though due to government pressure to get people out of state funded universities... but you should do extra exercises anyway on your own).

About uni of hel, if your interests do not lie in analysis or logic I would advise you to look somewhere else. These are pretty much the only areas where more advanced courses relating to current research are given.