Splash Biography

Let loose, and bring out your creative energy. Improv comedy theater is all about making things up and building a world from scratch with the people around you. In this class, you'll be up on stage, playing fun and bizarre games that will make you funnier.

Congratulations! You've been chosen to appear on a series of game show with a big payoff! You want to play strategically to win as much as possible, but when you look closely at these games, they seem to break math. We'll look at several games and have a discussion to try to figure out what's so weird with them. Along the way, we'll build up the basic tools for going on a real game show, or making any real-life decision with money. Here's a game as a warm up: You're on a game show, and you're presented with three doors. Behind one is a car, and behind the other two are goats. You get to pick a door and take whatever's behind it. Once you've chosen, but before you see what you've won, the host opens a door that you didn't choose, revealing a goat. Then the host offers to let you switch to the other unopened door, if you want. Should you take him up on it? It seems like it shouldn't matter; it seems like either door has a 50/50 shot of having the car. But no! Actually, you're better off switching; you'll win with probability 2/3! This puzzle is known as the Monty Hall Paradox, named after the original host of "Let's Make a Deal". Come find out what the deal is with this puzzle, and other, even weirder, puzzles. Along the way we'll establish the essential aspects of probability.

This class is about geometric shapes that are simple to describe but are infinitely complex. We'll describe a snowflake that can sit on your finger but whose border is infinitely long. We'll draw a shape that simultaneously appears one-dimensional, like a line, and two-dimensional, like a triangle, but is really something in between. And more.

In improv comedy, actors make up a play as they go along. In this class, you'll be up on stage, playing fun and bizarre games that will make you funnier.

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’ll look at some strange edge-cases of science. We will demonstrate superconductors that levitate magnets in midair, colorful fire that isn’t orange, materials that behave differently when cooled to 321°F below zero with liquid nitrogen, metal that when bent remembers its original shape, and more!

Infinity is really big. But we can think about infinity - and we can even see it. In this class, we will draw infinitely-detailed pictures known as fractals, in which you get a smaller version of the original picture by zooming in. Next, we will investigate some cool patterns of numbers that show up in our fractal pictures and in nature. Later, we will suppose we have two piles of infinitely many rocks. Can we determine which pile has more rocks? We can, and we will figure out how! Come join us for a look at how math can be creative, bizarre, and thought-provoking. No experience is required!

We'll look at some strange edge-cases of science. We'll make fire that's weird colors, play with a liquid that sticks to and acts up around magnets, and see how to set something on fire while leaving it unharmed. And there's more!

It is a well-kept secret among calculus teachers that a large fraction of the problems that they assign don't actually require any calculus at all, and are actually easier without calculus! This is a class for students who want to tell their teachers that all this "derivative" and "integral" crap is unnecessary (but who will refrain from doing so because they realize that the assigned problems are really a way to build skills in techniques that will be useful again and again in other contexts).