ESP Biography

Are you a chess enthusiast looking to further your game? If so, you could do worse than to come to this class, where we will look at various aspects of the game, with the view toward practical improvement. Through demonstrative games and interactive problem solving, we will help you sharpen your strategic and tactical skills. The course will help you understand positional play including careful piece maneuvering, as well as how to deal a winning blow with that well-timed sacrifice. We will also cover often understudied endgame techniques, emphasizing their importance in winning games. Please register if this interests you!

You've probably heard some of those puzzles about wardens asking prisoners to play some game and, against all our expectations, come up with a strategy that wins a large amount of the time. We'll take a look at some of these games and work out strategies to win them. In doing so, we'll see some cool mathematics. This course will also have real-life applications, since you never know when it might be helpful to have a winning strategy: if you're ever (wrongfully, we hope!) arrested and forced by an evil warden to play one of these games, you'll probably escape unscathed!

How is a coffe cup like a donut? They both have a hole. Algebraic topology is a branch of mathematics that gives us tools to state this precisely. For example, you can draw a loop around the hole of a donut or around the handle of a coffee cup. Coffee cups and donuts are topologically equivalent to each other, but not to an orange. In this course you will learn some of what mathematicians call algebra (which looks very different from high school algebra), and we will use it to do some topology. The only prerequisite is an interest in fun mathematics.

Cryptography plays an essential role in modern society; without it, using computers to send sensitive messages would be very dangerous. But thanks to some clever number theory, we can safely submit credit card information with little risk of interception. In this class, we'll look at some encryption methods and some possible attacks on them.

We will look at the game of nim and learn the winning strategy. We will then see why knowledge of the winning strategy for nim allows us to work out winning strategies for many other games very easily.

We will look at the Dutch defense (1. d4 f5), especially the Leningrad variation (in which black plays g6 and Bg7). We will see some common themes in this opening and some interesting games played with it.