This course develops expertise in Finance, Technology, Innovation, leadership, and decision-making by focusing on real-world challenges in the field of FinTech. We will be actively discussing and learning how to analyze, identify, and manage/innovate FinTech across many functional disciplines, including Financial, Insurance, Banking, Trading, Information Technology, and Budgeting. Students are introduced to the Financial industry and the FinTech ecosystem.

This course is designed to bring together concepts from Business Strategy and from traditional investments courses-in order to develop the thinking and techniques behind what is called "value investing." Unlike traditional investments curriculum, however, the emphasis here will be on individual company analysis and stock portfolio construction. That is, although understanding market dynamics remains important, we will mostly look at the capital markets from the vantage point of investors evaluating the investment prospects of one company at a time.

Tropical geometry studies algebraic varieties through their images under the tropical semiring, replacing addition with minimum/maximum and multiplication with addition. This course develops the foundations and central tools of the subject and shows how tropical methods encode rich algebro-geometric, combinatorial, and polyhedral information. Core themes include tropical varieties and their fans, initial degenerations, Grobner and Newton polyhedra, intersection theory, and connections to moduli, matroids, and enumerative geometry, explored via concrete and computational examples.