Very late reply to a post from a week ago! Hopefully the original author sees it... it should probably have been posted in a separate thread really.
Could anyone shed some light on the maths major of Discrete Maths & Operations Research? I'm a commerce student (Eco & Fin) considering a concurrent maths diploma. Some browsing and looking at the subjects involved has this major appealing to me most. But having so far only taken Calc2, LinAlg & Pr for Stats, I don't feel like I have much of an idea of what it involves.
So the major is a bit odd in that Discrete Maths and OR are quite different areas of maths, and you have to do some of both. From what I've heard, the discrete subjects are quite theoretical and the OR ones are more industry-focussed. Discrete covers things like combinatorics (counting large numbers of things without having to count them) and graph theory (the ways things can be connected to other things). This ends up being relevant to computer science, and possibly other areas, but not so much to business. I don't know specifically what the 3rd year Discrete Maths subject is like but I've been told that Graph Theory is fun.
On the OR side of things, you're basically looking at optimising some system (usually linear equations) subject to constraints. Traditionally it gets applied to logistics problems but can include other things too. e.g.: timetabling; scheduling delivery trucks; planning manufacturing operations; optimising electricity distribution; allocating patients to hospitals. The maths behind this kind of thing has a very different "feel" to the calculus-y stuff you would have seen before. I'm not sure what the undergrad subjects cover but the masters subject Optimisation for Industry is surprisingly light on the maths and heavy on the techniques for modelling complex real-world problems (and using software packages to actually solve to the models).
There's also a 3rd year subject on game theory (called Decision Making) which looks at how to make decisions subject to uncertainty and other "players" (often other firms in the business world) who may be either cooperating or competing with you. This is relevant to economics, but also crops up in unexpected areas like ecology. I'm thinking of taking that subject next year.