Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Chaos

I have just finished with teaching the lab portion of my colloquium course. These courses are one of the cool things about teaching at a TYC in Georgia. You get to pick a topic that you want to teach that is a bit outside the normal core curriculum and you are allowed to teach it and the credits even fit into a portion of the required curriculum. It's a win-win thing with we instructors getting to teach courses that are interesting, challenging and current and the students get to learn something outside the box if they are intrepid enough to go adventuring.

My course is called "Chaos Across the Sciences". I love the title because I always get a few students that think the course is about the chaos in the venacular sense of the word, i.e.-total disarray or disorder, anarchy or confusion. While on the surface the course may seem to look at those types of phenomena, it actually unravels the details behind complex systems and makes them understandable.

I think that the thing I like most about the course is the wide variety of different systems that can be studied. We look at planetary orbits, wildlife populations, epidemiology, futures trading, turbulance and galaxies to name a few systems. We learn to use tools such as phase space diagrams, state maps, topological foldings and fractals. We delve into puzzles such as Julia Sets, Cantor Dusts and Infinite Coastlines. All in a course available to anyone who is ready for college level algebra.

Are some of the students overwhelmed by the class? Of course but most of them go away with a new view of the world around them. When that happens, I figure I've done my job.

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