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Truth be told, the distinction doesn't exist outside the mind of students and certain more deluded academics. Graduates from all three programs are on average equally useless for just about anything ; p

QFT. Indeed, paying to waste time is doubly stupid.

But keep in mind that there is actually no difference between BSc Hons and BSc Advanced as long as you pick the right subjects.

This is a pretty strange poll... If we look at the development of calculus the key role was probably played by Archimedes' discovery of how to square a parabola segment. In the 19th century Riemann and Galois perhaps had the most significant legacy. In the 20th century no one was nearly...

What you say is true if one is interested in doing quant finance. On the other hand if you are just looking to get into a grad program at a bank, a finance undergrad degree would give some advantage over just a BSc. A combined degree maximises the options available at the end and also a lot...

Yep that's exactly what I meant... Do a BCom/BSc and then pick actuarial as commerce major and maths or stats as BSc major... there will be virtually zero overlap. If you are not interested in working in insurance, finance would be a decent choice of commerce major as well.

In my (admittedly extreme) view, there is no such thing as good teaching of actuarial studies because the syllabus is crap regardless and is more or less standardised across different unis. The courses you do at UNSW are virtually the same as what you do at ANU or MQ, so no need to worry. If...

It's not quite what I mean - what I am saying is that technically you will learn very little in an actuarial degree, most of it is confused and hopelessly outdated. The goal of education should be to get a foundation which allows you to easily learn new things under a wide variety of...

From what I've heard there is a university wide initiative to kill off 3 unit geneds and have people take 2 regular first year courses in their place... A sudden outbreak of common sense, is it not?

You will definitely learn a lot more from a science major, maths/stats/computing are all much more challenging than finance. With accounting and science background you can easily pick up undergrad finance by reading a couple of books (e.g. Hull, Luenbereger).

There are effective mathematical models for derivatives, not for the prices of the underlying assets. One doesn't need any formal education at all to trade the latter. Undergrad finance and economics are quite primitive and you should be perfectly capable of learning them yourself if you wish...

Check out my posts in the "do not do actuarial studies" thread. Actuarial studies teaches you no advanced mathematics at all and you absolutely must do a maths degree if you want to see real maths (and even then from 3rd year onwards, most likely). In fact, actuarial profession has fallen at...

The only reason to have anything to do with IS is if you got into BIT... Information systems degree is for those who didn't make the Commerce cut-off - you can transfer later but the usual caveats when transferring into a course with higher UAI reqs apply.

Intersection with stats is surprisingly small, so it will in no way hurt. Pure maths is the most useful if you are interested in research or learning more advanced topics in finance.

This thread may not be the greatest idea as this is a public forum indexed by search engines and identities can often be deduced from post histories.

Feynman on maths vs physics, which more or less carries over to modeling any real world system: YouTube - Richard Feynman - The Relation of Mathematics & Physics - Part 5

I think what you are talking about is physical or geometric intuition - if so, I definitely agree.

The man is also a finitist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finitism) and a creationist. See his website: A/Prof N J Wildberger Personal Pages

No doubt this is true, but those "trade secrets" almost never represent any genuine conceptual breakthroughs so probably not too hard to rediscover most of them if they are really needed. But the above advice is definitely good - what is important is an intuitive grasp of fundamentals and...

It's one of the better departments in Australia, of course, but decidedly second tier internationally. Anyway, if one only wants to do worthwhile courses there are hardly enough (intro to algebraic geometry was last run in 2004, for example).