UCL Department of Mathematics

The Mathematics Department is one of the founding departments of UCL, established in 1826. UCL was the first university in England to be established on an entirely secular basis, and to admit students regardless of their religion and race. In 1878, it became the first university in England to admit women students as well as men. The department is situated at the corner of Gower Place and Gordon Street on the main College site. It occupies floors 4-8 above the Students' Union and consists of lecture rooms, lecturers' offices and the departmental office. There is also a student common room and a quiet room with a small student library. The original prospectus for the Mathematics Department in 1826 stated: The Mathematical Sciences are so justly valued as a discipline of the reasoning faculties, and as an unerring measure of human advancement, that the commendation of them might seem disrespectful to the judgement of the reader, if they did not afford by far the most striking instance of the dependance of the most common and useful arts upon abstruse reasoning. The elementary propositions of Geometry were once merely speculative; but those to whom their subserviency to the speed and safety of voyages, is now familiar, will be slow to disparage any truth for the want of present and palpable usefulness. Nearly all of this remains as true today as then!