Beyond the Rules HA 2023

Whether you’re interested in being a physician healing patients, a business person negotiating an international agreement, a physicist decoding the universe, a computer scientist creating self-driving cars, a musician thrilling audiences, a chef creating an inspiring meal, or an architect designing living spaces, you will have the opportunity to create something that has never existed before: an original contribution to your field. In creating something new, you’ll be going beyond the rules, the formulas, and the recipes. But how exactly? In this course, students will be introduced to the creative problem-solving methods of the world’s top research mathematicians, including reasoning by analogy, the use and misuse of heuristics, visual thinking, and exploiting corner cases.  Students will discover what it means to break rules effectively by exploring how rules are made in the first place, ways in which our initial impressions can be wrong, and how to bring our intuition and right-brain thinking to the challenges we face. And because all discovery takes place in a network of peers, students will improve not only their ability to collaborate but also communicate their original ideas clearly.