First Year Seminar 191CNS10 - FYS- The Art of Thinking

What do mathematicians do? Are they a bunch of dull people who invented their own symbolic weird language so that no other person can understand what they talk about? Is the fundamental goal of mathematics just to be able to understand the arithmetic of numbers so that we can do accounting, or is it to be able to understand shapes so that we can share a birthday cake equally? In this course, we will explore how to wisely count finitely many objects and how to compare infinitely many objects, dive into the ocean of data and try to get meaning out of them for real-life scenarios, and even further, discover some of the most important modern techniques in mathematics (with a twist of philosophy), and apply them to understand shapes and objects. More importantly, we will try to come up with the answers to the aforementioned questions. No math prerequisite is required other than standard high school mathematics!

First year (Fr or Soph)