These sessions are intended to reinforce material from lectures, while also providing more opportunities for students to hone their skills in a number of areas, including the following: working with formal definitions; making deductions from information given; writing relatively routine proofs; investigating the properties of examples; thinking up examples with specified combinations of properties.

Dr Joel Feinstein is an Associate Professor in Pure Mathematics at the University of Nottingham. After reading mathematics at Cambridge, he carried out research for his doctorate at Leeds. He held a postdoctoral position in Leeds for one year, and then spent two years as a lecturer at Maynooth (Ireland) before taking up a permanent position at Nottingham. His main research interest is in functional analysis, especially commutative Banach algebras.