National University of Singapore

This course explores the changing roles of cities in an age of globalization. The first part examines cities as part of urban networks at the national, regional and international levels, and focuses on the implications arising from the rise of mega-cities and global cities. The second half investigates the challenges facing cities on the ground, including issues of the revitalization and re-imaging of city cores, changing retail landscapes, and the impact of telecommunications on the location of urban activities and peoples' mobility.

This course provides the necessary mathematical skills for other physics courses. Topics include: complex numbers and hyperbolic functions; single-variable calculus; Taylor series; first order and second order ordinary differential equations; vectors and matrices; eigenvalues and eigenvectors; partial differentiation; multiple integrals; and physical applications. The course requires students to take prerequisites.

The course provides an overview of geology, the science of the earth. An understanding of geology is important to many disciplines, providing information about the physical and chemical processes that determine the distribution of resources, location of hazards, operation of surface processes and the interaction between engineering structures and earth surface materials. The four components of the course begin with consideration of the earth’s structure and the role of plate tectonics, before considering the nature of earth surface materials and the functioning of earth surface systems.

This course explores the basic relationships between the diverse forms and functions in plants. Each plant group shares a common basic structural plan but contains many members that deviate from the basic plan in response to selection pressures from the environment. Knowledge of organismal biology is enhanced through selected topics in morpho-anatomical designs and functional adaptions.

The course covers the concepts and methods of mathematical language. The focus is more on the analytic and topological notions such as convergence and continuity, which are essential for a rigorous treatment of mathematical analysis. The ability to read and write mathematical proofs is also further developed in this module. Topics include real numbers, sequences and series of real numbers, metrics in Euclidean spaces, open and closed sets, continuous functions, compact sets, connected sets, sequences of functions. Major applications include intermediate value theorem, extreme value theorem.