I don't know who the 45th president is, but I do know that there are much better ways we could have chosen one: we're flying half-blind by having voters only vote for one candidate. In this class we will discover and compare the better voting systems that are possible when voters rank ALL the candidates.

Learn and play Codenames, a board game about finding and solving clever links between words. It's short and you can drop in or out any time.

3-5 mini-lectures with no unifying theme. Possible questions include: - How many bears can you run away from forever? - How can electrons prove inequalities for us? - Why is traffic so bad on your favorite roads? - Are there theorems that are true but can't be proven? - How can physics prove the Pythagorean Theorem?

Same idea as Unrelated Math I (M11152) except the topics will be - you guessed it - totally unrelated! So sign up for either or both of these; there will be no overlap between the two.

Some problems aren't just difficult for computers, they're impossible! Starting only with simple assumptions about what computer programs can do, we'll show that you can't reliably detect when a program has an infinite loop. Using that we'll prove Rice's Theorem, a shockingly powerful statement about the impossibility of many problems we might like to solve.

In the standard "Plurality" voting system, we ignore a lot of useful information by only asking voters to pick their favorite candidate. In this class we will compare the other voting systems that become possible if voters supply more information.

Might include: - A short 'proof' of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems - An application of the Buckingham-Pi Theorem to right triangles - A proof using wires and resistors of a standard inequality - The number of bears it takes to catch you in a circular arena - The number of bears it takes to catch you on the Sierpinski Triangle - Whatever else I come up with and have time for