ENROLL

David Liben-Nowell

A course on techniques used in the design and analysis of efficient algorithms. We will cover several major algorithmic design paradigms (greedy algorithms, dynamic programming, divide and conquer, and network flow). Along the way, we will explore the application of these techniques to a variety of domains (natural language processing, economics, computational biology, and data mining, for example). As time permits, we will include supplementary topics like randomized algorithms, advanced data structures, and amortized analysis.

Prerequisite: Computer Science 201 and Computer Science 202 (Mathematics 236 will be accepted in lieu of Computer Science 202)

Aaron Swoboda

This course gives the students a foundation in the general principles of economics as a basis for effective citizenship and, when combined with 110, as a preparation for all advanced study in economics. Topics include consumer choice theory; the formation of prices under competition, monopoly, and other market structures; the determination of wages, profits, and income from capital; the distribution of income; and an analysis of policy directed towards problems of public finance, pollution, natural resources, and public goods.

Victoria Morse

Enthusiasm, artistry, invention, exploration.... How do these notions of Renaissance culture play out in sources from the period? Using a range of evidence (historical, literary, and visual) from Italy and France in the fourteenth-sixteenth centuries we will explore selected issues of the period, including debates about the meaning of being human and ideal forms of government and education; the nature of God and mankind's duties toward the divine; the family and gender roles; definitions of beauty and the goals of artistic achievement; accumulation of wealth; and exploration of new worlds and encounters with other peoples.

Allison Murphy

Are human beings radically individual and atomic by nature, political animals, or something else? However we answer that question, what difference does it make for our understanding of the ways in which larger political communities come into existence and are maintained? In this course we will explore these and related questions while reading two of the most foundational works in political theory, Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’s Leviathan, as well as several contemporary pieces influenced by these thinkers.

Eddie E O'Byrn

This course serves as an introduction to the philosophical subfield of Critical Philosophy of Race. In this course students examine issues raised by the concept of race, practices and methods of racialization, and the persistence of racism across the world despite efforts to end it. This method of doing philosophy opposes racism in all forms; it rejects racial pseudoscience and religious determinism, biological racialism, all forms of racial supremacy, and all forms of racial eliminativism. Instead, critical philosophy of race aims to help students understand how race is constructed and the multi-faced ways it operates in the world today.

Allison Murphy

Is there a key to a happy and successful human life? If so, how do you acquire it? Ancient philosophers thought the key was virtue and that your chances of obtaining it depend on the sort of life you lead. In this course we’ll examine what these philosophers meant by virtue and how they understood its implications for your everyday life. We will situate the ancient understanding of virtue in the context of larger questions of metaphysics (the nature of being and reality), psychology, and ethics, as they arise in foundational works from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.

Meera Sehgal

How is it that in specific historical moments ordinary people come together and undertake collective struggles for justice in social movements such as Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Standing Rock, immigrant, and LGBTQ rights? How have these movements theorized oppression, and what has been their vision for liberation? What collective change strategies have they proposed and what obstacles have they faced? We will explore specific case studies and use major sociological perspectives theorizing the emergence of movements, repertoires of protest, collective identity formation, frame alignment, and resource mobilization. We will foreground the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, race, and class in these movements.