The first time I decided that I really wanted to study a Mathematics degree was after reading Simon Singh’s ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’. I was captivated by his description of Andrew Wiles’ struggle to prove one of the most difficult problems in Mathematics. Besides reading about Wiles’ remarkable perseverance and dedication, two important qualities for a mathematician, I also enjoyed some famous proofs that the book introduced to me. Whilst Mathematics has always been my strongest subject at school, previously I had merely taken for granted laws such as Pythagoras’ theorem or the infinity of primes. To see the proofs, seemingly simple but including one piece of ingenuity, made me understand that there is much beauty involved in Mathematics. This also spurred me on to read other popular mathematics books such as Marcus du Sautoy’s ‘Music of the Primes’, which exposed me to the field of number theory and the Riemann Hypothesis. I am also fascinated by the application of Mathematics in the real world, such as in Physics and Economics, my other A-level choices. One particular area which I have investigated has been the use of Mathematics in cryptography, which forms an essential part of e-commerce in today’s world. My essay on mathematical cyphers won the school Mathematics Essay Prize (out of a year of 150 pupils) and developed my understanding of the importance of number theory and modular arithmetic from researching the RSA system of public key cryptography. I think that I have the attributes that are required to study Mathematics successfully; I am very determined and am happy to spend time on a problem if the answer is not immediately obvious. I have advanced to the Intermediate Mathematical Olympiad twice, receiving a certificate of merit, and so have had experience in tackling longer questions. I find the less structured style of the Olympiad problems more interesting than usual syllabus questions as they require more thought and creativity in tackling them. This results in greater satisfaction when one does arrive at the solution. A major benefit of a Mathematics degree is the intellectual challenge that it poses and this is one of the main attractions for me. I will also be taking the STEP and AEA exams next summer along with my A- levels, which will expose me to more demanding material that will help me to make the transition from schoolwork to university level. In addition, I have participated in various Mathematics competitions. I was part of four-man teams in two inter-school competitions, the Hans Woyda competition and the Senior Mathematics Team Challenge, run by the UKMT. We were successful in both; in the Hans Woyda competition, our team won the ER Allsopp Plate, while in the Mathematics Team Challenge we were among the top 40 schools nationally. These experiences greatly helped my mathematical education as they tested both my ability to think quickly to tackle short-timed questions as well as my capacity to cope with more varied lengthier questions. As part of a team, I gained the confidence to communicate my ideas and learn from my fellow teammates, a valuable skill for studying Mathematics at university. I have also taken part in several extra-curricular activities, such as the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme. I am participating in the gold award, having completed the bronze and silver awards. The commitment and time management skills that I have gained from this will be useful in university life. I enjoy music and have passed my grade 7 piano exam with merit. I am also a keen chess player, having twice qualified for the National Gigafinal of the UK Chess Challenge (top 2500 in the UK). The hard thought and rigour associated with chess will transfer well into my mathematical studies. I am excited at the prospect of journeying further into the mathematical world that lies ahead at university and feel that I have the qualities that will make me a successful student of this diverse and elegant discipline.
这是一篇在 UCAS 旧格式下撰写的成功陈述。自 2026 年入学起，个人陈述改为三个独立的回答。以下是一个范例——经济学——展示每个问题的优秀回答是什么样的：
Volunteering at a Saturday food bank in Croydon, I helped a single father of three who had moved into temporary accommodation after a zero-hours contract collapsed. What startled me was not the hardship but the bureaucracy — he had been waiting six weeks for Universal Credit because a payment glitch had reclassified him as self-employed. A Sutton Trust talk by Stephen Machin pushed me from that observation toward the literature on benefit take-up and conditional cash transfers — first Banerjee and Duflo's evidence from rural India and Mexico, then Anna Aizer's recent NBER work on the design of welfare-to-work programmes in the US. I want to study Economics because the question running through these readings — why some welfare systems escape the dependency trap while others reproduce it — has rigorous answers that combine empirical microeconomics, mechanism design, and political economy in a way no other discipline can.
Further Mathematics has been the single qualification that has reshaped how I read Economics. Working through the chapter on differential equations let me approach Solow's original 1956 paper rather than the textbook simplification — and seeing convergence as an asymptotic result rather than a guarantee made me sceptical of growth-theory papers that quote "China is converging to the US frontier" without specifying the underlying production-function assumptions. That scepticism became my EPQ. Building on Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail and Elhanan Helpman's The Mystery of Economic Growth, I asked why the post-1978 Chinese growth episode fits neither the standard Solow convergence prediction nor the institutional pessimism of the extractive-institutions framework. My answer, framed around within-country variation in property-rights protection across coastal special economic zones, was the most rigorous piece of academic work I have produced. Economics A-level supplied the discipline-level vocabulary — perfect competition, Pareto efficiency, deadweight loss — but the model that has stayed with me is the prisoner's dilemma I first met in Maths Olympiad preparation, which I returned to repeatedly when reading Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict. In History A-level, the unit on the Bretton Woods system gave me the institutional context for Friedman's 1953 essay on flexible exchange rates — a connection that taught me how economic theory and political choice constantly co-evolve.
For the John Locke Institute 2025 Economics paper I argued — against my initial intuition — that personalised pricing is welfare-improving in aggregate, drawing on Pigou's first-degree price-discrimination framework, Hal Varian's 1989 paper on price discrimination, and the more recent empirical work by Dubé and Misra on ZipRecruiter's pricing experiments. Writing the essay forced me to take seriously the strongest version of the fairness objection — Sandel's argument in What Money Can't Buy that markets reshape the goods they price — and then to build a synthesis that conceded the moral worry while defending the consumer-surplus calculation. I came out of the process convinced that the welfare economics taught at undergraduate level is more subtle than the textbook indifference curves let on. Outside the essay competition, the book that has shaped me most is Katharina Pistor's The Code of Capital. Pistor's argument that property law constructs rather than merely protects economic value runs counter to the standard market-design literature I had been reading, and I have spent two terms working through her chapters on collateral, debt, and shareholder rights alongside the Acemoglu-Johnson critique she draws on. To test the framework against my own context, I built a small dataset on Hong Kong residential property using the publicly released Land Registry data and computed the share of the housing stock held by corporate (rather than personal) entities — a 32-line Python project that taught me more about institutional economics than any chapter I had read on it.
三个回答合计最多 4,000 字符，每个至少 350 字符。参见 UCAS 官方指南。