Online courses directory (2511)

This independent experimental study course is designed to allow students with a strong interest in independent research to fulfill the project laboratory requirement for the Biology Department Program in the context of a research laboratory at MIT. The research should be a continuation of a previous project under the direction of a member of the Biology Department faculty.

This course provides instruction and practice in written and oral communication. Journal club discussions are used to help students evaluate and write scientific papers.

This course is an advanced topics course on market and mechanism design. We will study existing or new market institutions, understand their properties, and think about whether they can be re-engineered or improved. Topics discussed include mechanism design, auction theory, one-sided matching in house allocation, two-sided matching, stochastic matching mechanisms, student assignment, and school choice.

This course will focus on various aspects of mirror symmetry. It is aimed at students who already have some basic knowledge in symplectic and complex geometry (18.966, or equivalent). The geometric concepts needed to formulate various mathematical versions of mirror symmetry will be introduced along the way, in variable levels of detail and rigor.

This course aims to provide an overview of Indian popular culture over the last two decades, through a variety of material such as popular fiction, music, television and Bombay cinema. The class will explore major themes and their representations in relation to current social and political issues. In particular, students will examine the elements of the formulaic "masala movie", music and melodrama, the ideas of nostalgia and incumbent change in youth culture, as well as shifting questions of gender and sexuality in popular fiction. During the course, students will look at some journalistic writing, advertising clips and political cartoons to understand the relation between the popular culture and the social imagery of a nation. This course is taught in English.

This course aims to provide an overview of Indian popular culture over the last two decades, through a variety of material such as popular fiction, music, television and Bombay cinema. The class will explore major themes and their representations in relation to current social and political issues. In particular, students will examine the elements of the formulaic "masala movie", music and melodrama, the ideas of nostalgia and incumbent change in youth culture, as well as shifting questions of gender and sexuality in popular fiction. During the course, students will look at some journalistic writing, advertising clips and political cartoons to understand the relation between the popular culture and the social imagery of a nation. This course is taught in English.

This course will give a detailed introduction to the theory of tensor categories and review some of its connections to other subjects (with a focus on representation-theoretic applications). In particular, we will discuss categorifications of such notions from ring theory as: module, morphism of modules, Morita equivalence of rings, commutative ring, the center of a ring, the centralizer of a subring, the double centralizer property, graded ring, etc.

This course explores topics related to the representation and expression of propositional attitudes (e.g. belief, knowledge, and desires) and speech acts (e.g. saying and asking) in natural language. The main focus will be on semantics of predicates such as believe, know, want, say, ask, etc. Other topics will include the syntax of main and embedded clauses and formal representation of the pragmatics of conversation. The course provides practice in written and oral communication.

The Creole languages spoken in the Caribbean are linguistic by-products of the historical events triggered by colonization and the slave trade in Africa and the "New World". In a nutshell, these languages are the results of language acquisition in the specific social settings defined by the history of contact between African and European peoples in 17th-/18th-century Caribbean colonies.

One of the best known Creole languages, and the one with the largest community of speakers, is Haitian Creole. Its lexicon and various aspects of its grammar are primarily derived from varieties of French as spoken in 17th-/18th-century colonial Haiti. Other aspects of its grammar seem to have emerged under the influence of African languages, mostly from West and Central Africa. And yet other properties seem to have no analogues in any of the source languages.

Through a sample of linguistic case studies focusing on Haitian Creole morphosyntax, we will explore creolization from a cognitive, historical and comparative perspective. Using Haitian Creole and some of its Caribbean congeners as test cases, we will evaluate various hypotheses about the development of Creole languages and about the role of first- and second-language acquisition in such development.

We will also explore the concept of Creolization in its non-linguistic senses. Then we will address questions of "Caribbean identities" by examining a sample of Creole speakers' attitudes toward the Creole language and the corresponding European language and toward the African and European components of their ethnic make-up.

This is a mostly self-contained research-oriented course designed for undergraduate students (but also extremely welcoming to graduate students) with an interest in doing research in theoretical aspects of algorithms that aim to extract information from data. These often lie in overlaps of two or more of the following: Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, and / or Operations Research.

This is a class about 'ought' and ought—you can think of it as a class in philosophy of language and metaphysics in which the focus is the ethical sphere. Some of the questions that we will broach include: How should we give a semantics for 'ought' generally? Is there anything special about the ethical 'ought'? Is there anything that you ethically ought to do, e.g., give to charity or refrain from stealing?

This course investigates Paris's oversized status as a global capital by looking at the events, transformations, cultures, and arts for which the city is known to help us better understand Paris and its place in French and global cultures today. Taught in French.

This course offers an analysis of the keen interest shown by France and the French in North American cultures since the eighteenth century. Not only did France contribute to the construction of both Canadian and American nations but also it has constantly delineated its identity by way of praising or criticizing North American cultures. Taught in French.

The seminar will be devoted to understanding what we're up to when we ascribe contents to a person's assertions and mental attitudes. We seek to make clear the rules of the game for the philosophy of language. We'll survey classic discussions of the issue by Field, Lewis and Stalnaker. But much of the emphasis of the class will be on getting clear about the limitations of our theoretical tools. I'd like to focus on places where our theorizing runs into trouble, or breaks down altogether.

This course offers an advanced survey of current debates about the ontology, methodology, and aims of the social sciences.

The class will be devoted to the work of David Lewis, one of the most exciting and influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. We will have seminar-style discussions about his work on counterfactuals, time, causation, probability, and decision-theory.

Many details of phonetic realization cannot be predicted from standard phonological representations on a language-independent basis, so phonetic realization must be specified in grammar. In this seminar we will investigate phonetic realization as a component of grammar.

The basic questions that we will address are:

• What is the form of the phonetic realization component?
• What is its relationship to phonology?