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| HST 408 - Print, Memory & Social Order |
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| 3 credits. Orr. Offered occasionally. This course examines the relationship between the media of print, orality and manuscript in early modern European society. Themes and issues covered will include the authority of the written word and its relationship to memorial evidence, the relationship of manuscript to the new media of print, and the development of distinctive popular and elite cultures from the 15th thought the 18th centuries. The course will also emphasize the broader question of how these developments affected the changing nature of social relations and the rule of law in pre-modern society. Possible authors studied will include E.P. Thompson, Carlo Ginzberg, Keith Thomas, Paul Seaver, Cynthis Herup and selected others. |
| IHST 227-IH1 - Plato, Euclid, and the Arabs |
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| 3 credits. Bier. Offered occasionally. In Western thought, we generally accept the writers of Classical and Hellenistic Greece as ancestors of the Renaissance, although this perceived lineage reflects a constructed history that eliminates Arab and Muslim contributions to our culture. This course will explore the impact of Greek authors on Islamic thought, and examine the influence of Arabs and Muslims upon later Western developments of literature, philosophy, science, mathematics and the arts. Through readings and discussion, students will explore a range of topics addressed by Plato and his successors, concerning geometry and the conceptualization of space, among other key topics. Readings will include selections from Plato's dialogues, Aristotle's criticism, Euclid's Elements, Neoplatonist works, and the writings of later Arab and Persian authors, and their impact on Europe's Renaissance which has so influenced our understandings today. |
| SOC 223 - Cultural Anthropology |
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| An introduction to the study of human beings as they interact in groups, with an emphasis on early human development and non-Western civilizations. We will inquire as to the nature and limits of human knowledge about ourselves. |
| IHST 245-IH1 - Civic Humanism |
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| 3 crdits. Orr. Offered occasionally. Civic Humanism refers to a cluster of themes in western political thought emphasizing the active, engaged life of the citizen and the cultivation of civic “virtue.” This course examines the development of civic humanism in western political thought from ancient through early modern times, the varieties of civic humanist thought (communitarian and juridical), and the evolving attitudes of civic humanist writers towards the emergence of commercial society. Possible authors studied will include Aristotle, Cicero, Niccolo Machiavelli, John Milton, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. |
| IHST 254-IH2 - American Intell Hist 1865-Pres |
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| 3 credits. Henderson. Offered occasionally. Traces key developments in American intellectual history since the end of the Civil War. The course will examine important topics such as the rise of Naturalism in the late nineteenth century, the birth of Progressivism, the emergence of intellectual and aesthetic Modernism, challenges to democratic culture, the emergence of New Deal liberalism and post-war conservatism, and the recent Postmodernist turn. We will read works by important figures in the intellectual history of the modern United States, including William Graham Sumner, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams, Thorstein Veblen, Clement Greenberg, Martin Luther King, Betty Friedan, Allan Bloom, and Noam Chomsky. Lectures and class discussions will examine the readings and place them and their authors in intellectual and historical context. There are no pre-requisites for this class, although a working knowledge of the general trajectory of post-Civil War US history is an advantage. |
| IHST 270-IH2 - Reading Peace:Hist Nonviolence |
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| 3 credits. Mattison. Offered occasionally. From Aristophanes' Lysistrata in 410 BC to the early Quakers, from The Beatitudes of Jesus to the writings of Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, the vision of peace has been one of the great hopes of mankind. In times of war, who are the peace-makers? This course will examine the seminal writings of the advocates of peace and non-violent solutions to political conflict, from the ancient Greeks to the 21st. century. We will question the received wisdom, challenge conventional assumptions and envision our way toward a just and lasting realization of peaceful societies in the century to come. |
| Writing Women |
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| IHST 276-IH2 - Urbanism: Modern American City |
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| 3 credits. staff. Offered occasionally. >From the ruins and excesses of the 20th Century American city we are left with 21st century urbanism--the multiple, ever-shifting ways in which people now experience public space and activity. This course examines the trends and ideologies that gave rise to the industrial city and suburbs, urban renewal areas and ghettos, and finally the contemporary city, which simultaneously recycles, mixes, and mourns all of these to produce American urbanism. Readings, class discussions, local site visits, and guest presentations from architects and artists highlight design on an urban scale. |
| L 237 - Horror Movies |
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| 3 credits. Paul. Offered summer. This class examines the origins and development of horror cinema over the last century, with attention paid to a variety of periods including German Expressionism, American 50s horror, Gore, Japanese horror and conceptual horror. The class looks at a variety of filmmakers from Murnau and Wiene to Warhol, Carpenter and Nakata to see how genre concerns are balanced with the director's aesthetic prerogative. Students study films within cultural contexts to see how horror films are frequently a reflection of social concerns, and investigate the fine line between camp and genre excellence. |
| L 380 - Performance Poetry |
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| 3 credits. Staff. Offered spring. |
| L 349-TH - French Feminism |
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| 3 credits. Ghaussy. Offered Fall. While the heated debates around which kinds of Feminism more usefully counter the patriarchal structures we live with, the theory-laden French Feminism celebrating women as different or the socially-oriented Anglo feminism that strives for sameness with respect to the sexes, have subsided with a large body of feminist thought that weds these schools today, the turf wars within Feminism are as alive as ever. Moreover, the sex-appeal of the French Feminist credo, "vive la différance," and their joyful and playful attitude toward reclaiming and re-inventing patriarchal constructions, continue to seduce, fascinate, and appall women (and men). We will begin our exploration into French Feminism with the philosophical and very practical questions raised by Simone de Beauvoir, study the possibilities of a feminine language or écriture féminine and come to terms with the body as informing thought through Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Monique Wittig and others, and engage in a rigorous critique of French Feminist issues as perhaps utopian, perhaps élitist, by non-academics and women of color. The readings are non-traditional and often hard to classify. They range from polemics to fiction, from philosophy to psychoanalysis, from the textual to the visual with a firm focus on what happens when women speak. |
| SCI 220 - General Biology |
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| This general course in biology is designed to address basic concepts of biology, covering the origin of life and species, cell theory, genetics, immunity (AIDS incorporated), how organism reproduce, the mechanisms of learning and memory, and the biological basis of animal behavior. Although a wide spectrum of subjects will be covered, the emphasis will be on vertebrate biology, including human biology. If time permits, we will survey the basic characteristics of human organ systems. |
| PSY 202 - Personal & Abnormal Psychology |
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| 3 credits. Otani. Offered fall, spring. This course surveys personality theories, various concepts of psychological adjustment, and models of mental health. Specifically, the students examine bio-psycho-social foundations of human personality theories, normal and deviant human behaviors. The class format includes lectures, discussions, and case studies. No prerequisite. Fulfills social science requirement. |
| L 243-IH1 - Traditional Korean Literature |
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| 3 credits. Rhee. Offered occasionally. This course critically examines the premodern literature of Korea, beginning with the Three Kingdoms Period and extending to the middle of the nineteenth century. The readings will range from foundation myths, folktales, and songs, to memorials addressed to the king, letters written by a Korean princess, and poems composed by ladies of entertainment. We will explore in particular the ideas of filial piety, chastity, and various forms of fidelity as they are manifest in stories such as Ch’unhyang and Simch’ong. How were these values linked to the Confucian order so integral to Korea’s self-image? How did the community understand its place in the world, especially in relation to its neighbors, Japan and China? Were the people of this ancient peninsula satisfied with their lot? What role did fate and the gods play in their experience of everyday life? The works we will read, originally composed in classical Chinese, and others, recorded in the vernacular after the invention of the Korean alphabet, provide various answers to these questions. Emphasizing the general inextricability of ideas from social, economic, and political forces of the period, we will discuss the special relevance that contextual understanding assumes in the case of reading primary works from traditional Korea, a country that for a long time the West called The Hermit Kingdom. No prior knowledge of Korea or Korean is required. |
| The Book: Art, Technology, Theory |
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| L 328 - Narrative Poetry |
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| 3 credits. Merrill. Offered fall. Before the novel, long narrative poems held the highest place in the literary canon, falling generally in the categories of Epic or Romance, these poems developed elaborate conventions for story telling and, in many cases, came to be associated with the foundation or identity of a particular nation and people. Sometimes the poems were composed for oral recitation and existed only in oral form for hundreds of years. This class involves a careful reading of some of the most important narrative poems in western literature. Our reading includes works from such as Homer, Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Ariosto, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Rabelais, Chrètien, Milton, Tennyson, and the anonymous authors of the Lancelot, Beowulf, Cid, Tristan, Roland, Gawain, and many others. The goal of this course is to give students a comprehensive grounding in literary works that, although now somewhat out of fashion, organized Western culture at the deepest level for a thousand years. |
| L 329 - Deep Ecology: Environ. Ethic |
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| 3 credits. DeBrabander. Offered occasionally. Are we merely in nature, or intimately part of it? What do we owe the earth, and may we take any liberties with her? How can we figure nature and its members into our moral community, or extend moral thinking to include it? What have been the traditional obstacles of such a project, and what present challenges – practical and ideological – face it now? We will consider such questions among others in exploring literature of ecological consciousness and an emerging environmental ethic. Our guides in this course will include Thoreau, Lao Tzu, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Arne Naess, and Peter Singer. |
| SCI 280 - Human Anatomy |
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| 3 credits. Robinson. Offered fall. The focus of this course is to understand basic components of human anatomy, including gross and microscopic anatomy. It intends to discuss not only skin, muscle and skeletal systems, but also the nervous system, large organs, immunity and developmental anatomy. Related variations in human anatomy due to aging and certain illnesses will be discussed as well. This course overlaps somewhat with SCI 220 General Biology, so students should take either one but not both. No prerequisite. Fulfills natural science requirement. |
| L 335 - Black American Literature |
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| 3 credits. Cager. Offered occasionally. This course surveys African-American literature written during the Harlem Renaissance as a way of examining confluence of forces that created the New Negro at the beginning of the 20th century. The literature of the Harlem Renaissance represents several major artistic movements that created the contemporary African-American persona and fueled subsequent artistic movements worldwide. Discussion of work of Jean Toomer, Zora Neal Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, W. E. B. Dubois, and Langston Hughes will be central to the course. 3 credits. Cager. Offered occasionally. A survey of African-American and Latino literature both in the oral and written traditions in an attempt to answer such questions as the following: How does the African inform Africana culture in the new world? Who were the pioneers of African-American and Latino literature and what kind of consciousness was presented in the early literature? What is the connection between African-American and Latino literature and the development of race awareness and pride during the 20th century? Authors include Toni Morrison, August Wilson, Jorge Amado, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and others. |
| L 406 - One Act Workshop |
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| 3 credits. Cary. Offered fall. This course is designed for students who have studied theatre and drama and who want to write plays. The worship focuses on giving the students the tools and experience to write short plays. In addition to playwriting exercises, students see a play, meet with a visiting director, attend a visiting playwrights panel, read interview with playwrights, and analyze short plays by modern and contemporary playwrights. Staged readings of the students' one-act plays are performed throughout the semester. |
| Semiotics |
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| L 407 - Advanced Fiction Workshop |
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| 3 credits. Winik. Offered spring. Students in this class will write, share, and discuss their own short narratives and personal essays -- focusing on the craft issues common to both fiction and creative non-fiction. These include narrative voice, the use of dialog, the use of humor, the use of anger, using detail to characterize places and people, and post-modern flourishes (writing about the writing). Some of the writers whose work we will look at to inspire and guide us are Lorrie Moore, David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion, Rick Moody, Sarah Vowell, Nick Hornby, David Sedaris, Dave Eggers. |
| L 5376 - Russian Lit II: Soviet Period |
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| 3 credits. Merrill. Offered Fall. A survey of important writers and artistic movements in Russian literature of the 20th Century, from about the time of the Revolution in 1917 to end of the century. We’ll study movements such as Constructivism, Symbolism, Socialist Realism, and others. These movements will be considered in the context of the historical and political events inside the Soviet Union and the relations of communism to the anti-communist world. This last issue will be of particular importance in the work of Russian émigré or exiled writers, particularly Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Outside of the Soviet Union, the best known writers are those who criticize communism Pasternak or Bulgakov. The very best writers of the Soviet Union are still little known to the outside world - Sholokhov, Zamyatin, Mayakovsky, Bely, Akhmatova. We’ll read both groups. Most people know that 19th Century Russian novelists are among the best in the world; the same is true of the 20th Century but these writers are not often read in the West. |
| L 388-TH - Perform. Studies& Cyber Theory |
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| 3 credits. Cheon. Offered spring. This cass focuses on theories of what constitutes 'performance' in everyday life, ritual, art, and cyberspace interaction. As a new and interdisciplinary field, performance studies merges anthropology, sociology, theatre, art, and new media as a way to both blur and redefine the boundaries of what is considered performative. The theoretical framework of performativity, whether it is looking at the everyday presentation of the self or the performance of nations and states, is a tool that enables us to critically examine the canons which produce these constructed identities. The course will look at key writers of performance studies and cyber theory in order to understand the effects of performative actions, especially in the context of the global expansion of media culture. |
| L 420 - High Moderism in Lit. & Philos |
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| 3 credits. Merrill. Offered Fall. "High Modernism" denotes a moment in Euro/American history between about 1900 and 1930 when the grounds of philosophical and artistic reality to shift. These writers, committed to the notion of a high culture and generally opposed to the emerging avant gardes (futurism, surrealism, dada, cubism), reworked such fundamental questions as human existence, consciousness, time, language, history and identity. They tended to produce "monumental" works encompassing a totality of human experience. The class will cover both literature and philosophy but may include some readings in science and math, especially Einstein or Poincaré. Readings will include some of the following authors: French writers Marcel Proust, Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty; German authors Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Thomas Mann, Ludwig Wittgenstein; American writers T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Adams, Henry James, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound; British writers Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad. Pre-requisite: a 400-level course requires at least one 200-level course in Literature. |
| Contemporary Critical Studies |
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| Vienna: Fin-du-Siecle I |
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| L 444 - Romanticism I |
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| 3 credits. Merrill. Offered fall. This course surveys the turbulent Euro-American culture from the French Revolution (1789 to 1850). Students read literary and philosophical works that deal with subjects such as the rise of socialist utopian ideas, the emergence of feminism, romanticism. It is impossible to understand the 20th century without understanding the momentous events of the 19th. Some authors discussed are Percy and Mary Shelley, Jean-Paul Marat, Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Karl Marx, Tennyson, Mary Wollstoncraft, Madame de Stael, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Goethe, and others. The first in a three-course sequence in 19th century cultural studies (see l 445 Romanticism II and L 471 Russian Literature to the Revolution). |
| L 345 - Romanticism II |
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| 3 credits. Merrill. Offered spring. In the preface to Justine, the Marquis de Sade poses a question that seems to have preoccupied the culture of the late 19th century: is it "possible to find in oneself physical sensations of a sufficiently voluptuous piquancy to extinguish all moral affections." This class examines the second generation of Romantics or negative Romanticism in order to understand the retreat of the arts from the long held commitment to political and moral ideals. Students examine the rise of aestheticism, symbolism, and art for art's sake. The class reads literary works and also philosophy and history. Some authors we explore are Byron, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Husymans, Wilde, Keats, Dostoyevsky, and many others. In them we will see the collapse of European culture begun in the Renaissance and the beginnings of the dystopia of the 20th century. The second in a three-course sequence in 19th century cultural studies (see L 444 Romanticism I and L 471 Russian Literature to the Revolution). |
| L 5581 - Jean-Paul Sartre |
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| An in-depth examination of Sartre's philosophy and art, focusing on such topics as freedom, contingency, choice, guilt, the imagination, the relation to others, art, revolt, family and society, history, alienation, solitude, and political engagement. One thread we will be following throughout the semester is a question that Sartre kept asking in different works throughout his career: How is it possible to know and understand a person's life as the freedom Sartre believed each one's life to be? We read from Sartre's plays, novels, philosophical works, essays, biographies of artists, as well as from Sartre's autobiography. |
| LA 362 - Doing Documentary Work |
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| 3 credits. Wallace. Offered occasionally. In some ways a follow-up to Critical Inquiry...uses documentary form to explore how our point of view is influenced by our frame of reference, social and educational backgrounds, personal morals and political beliefs. Through documentary research (oral histories, archival sources, etc.) and writing, students will explore the relationaship between "reality" and the narratives we construct to represent and interpret it. Texts will include literary documentary works such as George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, James Agee's Let us Now Praise Famous Men, Muriel Rukeyser's book-length poem about West Virginia coal miners, The Book of the Dead and Gary Nabhan's Gathering the Desert. Robert Cole's Doing Documentary Work will be a primary source for methodology. |
| PHIL 222-IH1 - Ancient Eastern Philosophy |
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| 3 credits. DeBrabander. Offered occasionally. This course will examine classical texts and writings of the major thinkers of ancient India and China, with a view to understanding the intellectual foundations and development of these respective cultures. Among others, we will cover the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, the Buddha’s Sermons and biography, Confucius’ Analects, and the Tao te Ching. We will examine the centuries-long discussion between these thinkers regarding such fundamental philosophical topics as the structure of reality and the nature of the human self, also the religious issues of destiny of the soul and the existence and nature of God, and the moral and political concerns of human social duties and proper techniques of ruling. In surveying this long exchange of ideas, we will consider the historical forces that shaped and prompted these ideas, and the historical influences that they in turn imparted. |
| PHIL 232-IH1 - Classical Greek & Roman Philos |
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| 3 credits. DeBrabander. Offered occasionally. The ancient Greek world, and the adoption and mutation of its intellectual traditions by the Romans, provide seminal ideas at the basis of Western civilization. This course will examine the roots and progression of that tradition through its heyday and demise, culminating with its early transformations by Christian thought. We will cover some of the well known writings of major philosophers of this period, including Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Lucretius, and Augustine, and consider the historical, political, religious and literary trends to which they responded and which molded their thought in turn. This means we will also sample from texts of Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Cicero, and Julius Caesar, among others. |
| PHIL 261-IH2 - Moral Philosophy of Modernity |
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| 3 credits. DeBrebander. Offered occasionally. This course will cover the major influences, statements and debates in Western moral thought from the end of the Renaissance through the 19th century. It will explore the continuity and changes in various approaches to questions concerning the best way to live, the social duties we have, and the manner of ethical motivation. We will begin by examining the influence of Stoicism and the Reformation on the Christian moral paradigm of the Middle Ages, follow the emergence of Enlightenment ethical ideals, and conclude with the critique and rejection of the reigning moral paradigms and their religious, cultural and philosophical foundations in the 19th century. Among the writers we examine will be Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Mill and Nietzsche. |
| PHIL 277-IH2 - The Scientific Revolution |
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| 3 credits. DeBrabander. Offered occasionally. The period since the Renaissance has known a remarkable rush of scientific advances culminating in unparalleled conveniences in human history. This course will examine texts that chronicle the major advances of this period, with a view to the development of the scientific method that made these advances possible, the socio-political forces that encouraged particular innovations and areas of research, and of course, the effect and reception of these advances as they emerged. |
| SOC 323-TH - Theories of Globalization |
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| 3 credits. DeBrabander Our world seems to be getting ever smaller: natural disasters in one part of the planet reverberate around the globe; American fast food can be enjoyed in most every nation; information streams electronically across the earth in a matter of seconds. Is this a good thing, this “globalization”? Some think it is. Some simply think it’s inevitable. And some react with immense anxiety and animosity. Why such an uproar over globalization? First of all, what is globalization exactly? It is a rather nebulous term, in fact, made so by the immensity of its scope: globalization refers to an amalgam of political, economic, cultural and social theories. This course aims to explore the various incarnations and aspects of globalization, in order to amass some definition of it. We will also evaluate globalization as a theory and consider the many compelling criticisms of it, as well as its real and possible consequences. |
| SOC 345-TH - Activism and Social Theory |
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| 3 credits. Brown. Offered occasionally. Efforts to understand human society have always been linked to activist struggles to achieve social change. This course examines some of the major social theories of the 19th and 20th centuries including Marxism, critical theory and postmodernism. We will consider the influence of these ideas on social movements such as the labor movement, the student movement of the 1960s and the anti-globalization movement and we will discuss the ways in which the form, content and goals of activist efforts evolve in connection with ideas from philosophers and social scientists. |
| SCI 237 - Mathematics as Experience |
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| 3 credits. Organ. Offered Occasionally. This course will cover a variety of topics in mathematics. The goal is to impart an understanding of the range of mathematical ideas, to be appreciated as a useful tool, as a language, and as a work of art in itself. We will cover the history and development of the subject through lectures, class discussion, and hands-on work. As learning can take place only through doing, students will be directed in actively solving problems. Topics will include the vocabulary of mathematics, the structure of numbers, the development of analytic rigor, concepts of infinity, abstraction, symmetry, and others. |