Splash Biography

Do you like puzzles? Then come solve them with me! We'll work out puzzles like this one: You are on one side of the river, and you are trying to move a wolf, sheep, and cabbage across the river in your boat. Unfortunately, your boat can only hold you and one other thing (either the wolf, the sheep, or the cabbage). You can't leave the wolf alone with the sheep, or it will eat it, and similarly, you can't leave the sheep alone with the cabbage. How do you get everyone across the river?

In this class, we'll uncover democracy's dirty secrets. What different ways can we count votes, and what are their strengths and weaknesses? What does it mean for an election to be fair? When making a decision with a bunch of people, it might seem most fair to have a vote. But in many ways, elections don't work the way you expect. If you are trying to hold an election between three candidates, no election system that you or anyone else can come up with can ever be fair. Elect to take our class!

We understand the movement of planets; and we understand the particles inside an atom. Why doesn't our knowledge of the laws and mathematics of the universe tell us much about the weather, our friends, and the behaviors of ant colonies? How is it that we can split the atom and launch a rocket to Mars, and yet we still can't define life, or even predict the weather a week from Tuesday? In this class, we'll talk about what we do understand about our universe, what we don't understand, and why we can't understand everything.

Algorithms drive much of the technology we use every day, from your computer to Google. This class is a quick introduction to sorting algorithms: algorithms used to organize lists. If I gave you cards 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in a random order, how do you sort them? One strategy would be to shuffle them, check to see if they're sorted, and if not, keep shuffling until they are. This would take you a long time! A better strategy might be to look through, find the 1, put it on top, find the 2, put that second, and so on, until it is sorted. This is faster, but we can do better still. Come see and try out stupid algorithms, funny algorithms, fast algorithms, and others. We will race against each other to sort different piles using the algorithms we learn about.

The Supreme Court made headlines this year when it upheld the Affordable Care Act. While some cases, like the Affordable Care Act, and like Bush v. Gore, get more attention from the media and the public than others, the Court decides seventy to eighty cases each year, on important issues like privacy, free speech, affirmative action, and intellectual property rights. In this class we will learn more about what the Court does. We will discuss how the Court decides cases, and why, and where the Court gets the power to do so.