Have you ever turned the last page of a book and sat there admiring how neatly the author wrapped everything up? Turned the last page and thrown the book at the wall? Walked out of a theater gushing, or walked out of a theater wondering how it went so wrong? The way a story ends can shape how we feel about the entire work. What makes an ending good or bad? In this class, we’ll discuss features of great and terrible endings, and pull examples from pop culture such as Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, Twilight, and more. Spoiler alert!

Computer programs need to store and manipulate data--but that data can stored in many different ways! Sometimes it makes sense to store data in a binary tree, but in order to maintain quick lookups, binary normally need to be balanced. And there are lots of different specialized binary trees for different applications. That's where the magic comes in: splay trees don't stay balanced, but are in many cases provably as or more efficient than more complicated, specialized data structures for particular types of problems. And it gets better--the (as-yet unproven) dynamic optimality conjecture proposes that for any sequence of accesses of elements, splay trees are at least as efficient as a specialized data structure which knew the sequence of accesses ahead of time!

NAPOLEON.

REVOLUTIONS OF 1848.

GERMAN AND ITALIAN UNIFICATION.