Welcome to the course home page for the spring term OLLI course “It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again”, which will meet in Magrath Library, Room 8, seven Wednesdays from 12:30-2:00 beginning March 29. Feel free to contact me (mailto:thomas.naps@gmail.com) anytime you have questions or concerns about the course.
Course description from OLLI catalogue: Yogi Berra’s famous quote belies the deep expressive nature of self-similarity. Bach’s fugues, Escher’s drawings, Mandelbrot’s and Lindenmayer’s fractals, Hoare’s recursive quicksort algorithm, Gödel’s proof, Turing’s halting problem, Hofstadter’s strange loop of consciousness. These amazing creations of the human mind are made possible only by our ability to think in abstractions that circle back onto themselves without being contradictory. This course will explore such modes of thought and their paradoxical mix of enormous potential and definable limitations.
Here’s an outline of what we’ll be doing each week. Depending on the pace we set and your feedback to me, this “plan” is likely to evolve. Shortly before each week’s class, the topic description below will become an active link to the slides that we’ll cover in class.