A THEMAS Course


Course: MAT 80TH  Time: TR 3:30 – 4:45 pm  Location: Phelps Hall, 2516 Gold enrollment code: 29611  

Instructors: Marcos Novak and Diarmid Flatley


Knowledge is often presented to us in fragmented form. We become informed about the parts, but lose the sense of the whole. We gain expertise, but lose balance. This course proposes to treat knowledge as a transdisciplinary, organic, n-dimensional continuum.

“Mediated Worlds” examines how technologies and humanities (means and ends), engineering and mathematics (concrete and abstract), and arts and sciences (synthesis and analysis) inform all aspects of how we come to know and make the world.

Touching upon themes ranging from media arts and digital humanities to virtual reality and future cinema, from generative systems and the poetics of new technologies to non-Euclidean geometries and n-dimensional spacetime, from liquid architectures and new music to pattern formation and algorithmic aesthetics, from artificial life and machine learning to soft robotics and bioengineering, from world mythologies and ancient philosophies to cognitive psychology and neuroscience, from thermodynamics and symmetry operations to genomics and new materials, from quantum entanglement and live performance to synthetic ecologies and the Anthropocene, this course presents an interconnected model of knowledge, learning, creative discovery, and 21st century citizenship.

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A THEMAS COURSE:

The THEMAS*** model proposes a continuum across disciplines previously separated by narrow specializations. It builds upon the successes of STEM/STEAM, with greater emphasis on the humanities, creativity, and synthesis.

***Technologies Humanities Engineering Mathematics Arts Sciences