This course covers Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics, systems with constraints, rigid body dynamics, vibrations, central forces, Hamilton-Jacobi theory, action-angle variables, perturbation theory, and continuous systems. It provides an introduction to ideal and viscous fluid mechanics, including turbulence, as well as an introduction to nonlinear dynamics, including chaos.

This course is an introduction to the history, theory, practice, and implications of rhetoric, the art and craft of persuasion through

Analyzing persuasive texts and speeches
Creating persuasive texts and speeches

Through class discussions, presentations, and written assignments, you will get to practice your own rhetorical prowess. Through the readings, you’ll also learn some ways to make yourself a more efficient reader, as you turn your analytical skills on the texts themselves. This combination of reading, speaking, and writing will help you succeed in:

learning
to read and think critically
techniques of rhetorical analysis
techniques of argument
to enhance your written and oral discourse with appropriate figures of speech
some techniques of oral presentation and the use of visual aids and visual rhetoric.

This course is an introduction to three of the major genres of traditional Chinese literature—poetry, fiction and drama, with a focus on vernacular fiction. We will read translations of a number of the “masterworks” of Chinese literature. We will also examine the intertextuality between these genres — how poetry blends into narrative, how fiction becomes drama, and drama inspires fiction. Through reading these selected works of traditional Chinese literature, we will examine some of the major features of traditional Chinese society: religious and philosophical beliefs, the imperial system and dynastic change, gender relations, notions of class and ethnicity, family, romance and sexuality. All works are read in translation; no language background is necessary.

This course will introduce you to the Western philosophical tradition through the study of thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Cavendish, Hume, and Kant. You’ll grapple with questions that have been significant to philosophy from its beginnings: Questions about the nature of the mind, the existence of God, the foundations of knowledge, and the good life. You’ll also observe changes of intellectual outlook over time, and the effect of scientific, religious, and political concerns on the development of philosophical ideas.

This course explores how citizen science can support community actions to combat climate change. Participants will learn about framing problems, design ways to gather data, gather some of their own field data, and consider how the results can enable action. Leaks in the natural gas system—a major source of methane emissions, and a powerful contributor to climate change—will be a particular focus.
The course was organized by ClimateX and Fossil Free MIT, with support from the National Science Foundation for the methane monitoring equipment. It was offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week January term at MIT.

This course provides a broad overview of issues related to climate change, with an emphasis on those aspects most relevant to computer scientists. Topics include climate science, climate models and simulations, decision-making under uncertainty, economics, mitigation strategies, adaptation strategies, geoengineering, policy-making, messaging, and politics.The course will culminate in a presentation of a research project which might include a paper, a blog, software etc.

The primary goal of these resources and programming, created as part of a larger initiative to expand climate justice education at MIT, is to provide support to faculty members and instructors across disciplines in integrating climate justice content and related instructional approaches into their courses.
Funded by the Alumni Class Funds Grant, the Toolkit houses a wide range of climate-justice-adaptable teaching modules, a starter guide for teaching climate justice, resources for students, and climate justice data sets that can serve as supportive tools to enhance teaching content and approaches.

This course introduces students to climate studies, including beginnings of the solar system, time scales, and climate in human history. It is offered to both undergraduate and graduate students with different requirements.

This course introduces students to climate studies, including beginnings of the solar system, time scales, and climate in human history. It is offered to both undergraduate and graduate students with different requirements.

The goal of the Climate Primer website is to summarize the most important lines of evidence for human-caused climate change. It confronts the stickier questions about uncertainty in our projections, engages in a discussion of risk and risk managment, and concludes by presenting different options for taking action. We hope that the facts prepare you for more effective conversations with your community about values, trade-offs, politics, and actions.
In March 2024, the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative launched the first major update to the Climate Primer. The updated Primer includes more precise estimates of future global warming and its effects on global temperatures and extreme weather events, important advances in climate modeling, new actions taken around the world to adapt to the impacts of climate change, and the latest data about the pace at which clean energy and other critical climate solutions are being deployed. Read more about the update on the MIT Environmental Solutions website.

This course is designed to provide an understanding of how the human brain works in health and disease, and is intended for both the Brain and Cognitive Sciences major and the non-Brain and Cognitive Sciences major. Knowledge of how the human brain works is important for all citizens, and the lessons to be learned have enormous implications for public policy makers and educators.
The course will cover the regional anatomy of the brain and provide an introduction to the cellular function of neurons, synapses and neurotransmitters. Commonly used drugs that alter brain function can be understood through a knowledge of neurotransmitters. Along similar lines, common diseases that illustrate normal brain function will be discussed. Experimental animal studies that reveal how the brain works will be reviewed.
Throughout the seminar we will discuss clinical cases from Dr. Byrne’s experience that illustrate brain function; in addition, articles from the scientific literature will be discussed in each class.

How genetics can add to our understanding of cognition, language, emotion, personality, and behavior. Use of gene mapping to estimate risk factors for psychological disorders and variation in behavioral and personality traits. Mendelian genetics, genetic mapping techniques, and statistical analysis of large populations and their application to particular studies in behavioral genetics. Topics also include environmental influence on genetic programs, evolutionary genetics, and the larger scientific, social, ethical, and philosophical implications.

This course explores the cognitive and neural processes that support attention, vision, language, motor control, navigation, and memory. It introduces basic neuroanatomy, functional imaging techniques, and behavioral measures of cognition, and discusses methods by which inferences about the brain bases of cognition are made. We consider evidence from patients with neurological diseases (Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, Balint’s syndrome, amnesia, and focal lesions from stroke) and from normal human participants.

This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.
This survey course is intended to review memory and its impact on our lives. Memories make us who we are, and make us what we are going to become. The loss of memory in amnesia can cause us to lose ourselves.
Memory provides a bridge between past and present. Through memory, past sensations, feelings, and ideas that have dropped from conscious awareness can be subsequently recovered to guide current thought and action. In this manner, memory allows us to locate our car in the parking lot at the end of the day or guides us to avoid retelling the same joke to the same friend. This seminar will focus on how memories are created and controlled such that we are able to remember the past. Recent insights from non-human electrophysiological and human brain imaging research will be emphasized.

This undergraduate course is designed to introduce students to cognitive processes. The broad range of topics covers each of the areas in the field of cognition, and presents the current thinking in this discipline. As an introduction to human information processing and learning, the topics include the nature of mental representation and processing, the architecture of memory, pattern recognition, attention, imagery and mental codes, concepts and prototypes, reasoning and problem solving.

This is a class about applying autonomy to real-world systems. The overarching theme uniting the many different topics in this course will center around programming a cognitive robotic. This class takes the approach of introducing new reasoning techniques and ideas incrementally. We start with the current paradigm of programming you’re likely familiar with, and evolve it over the semester—continually adding in new features and reasoning capabilities—ending with a robust, intelligent system. These techniques and topics will include algorithms for allowing a robot to: Monitor itself for potential problems (both observable and hidden), scheduling tasks in time, coming up with novel plans to achieve desired goals over time, dealing with the continuous world, collaborating with other (autonomous) agents, dealing with risk, and more.

This seminar examines the history and legacy of the Cold War on American science. It explores scientist’s new political roles after World War II, ranging from elite policy makers in the nuclear age to victims of domestic anti Communism. It also examines the changing institutions in which the physical sciences and social sciences were conducted during the postwar decades, investigating possible epistemic effects on forms of knowledge. The subject closes by considering the place of science in the post-Cold War era.

This course provides an introductory survey of data science tools in healthcare. It was created by members of MIT Critical Data, a global consortium consisting of healthcare practitioners, computer scientists, and engineers from academia, industry, and government, that seeks to place data and research at the front and center of healthcare operations.
The most daunting global health issues right now are the result of interconnected crises. In this course, we highlight the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to health data science. It is intended for front-line clinicians and public health practitioners, as well as computer scientists, engineers, and social scientists, whose goal is to understand health and disease better using digital data captured in the process of care.
What you’ll learn:

Principles of data science as applied to health
Analysis of electronic health records
Artificial intelligence and machine learning in healthcare

This course is part of the Open Learning Library, which is free to use. You have the option to sign up and enroll in the course if you want to track your progress, or you can view and use all the materials without enrolling.

This is a 9-day hands-on workshop about collaboration, design, and electronics prototyping. No previous experience with computer programming or electronics is required. Beginning students will be taught everything they need to know and advanced students will be challenged to learn new skills. Participants will learn about microcontroller programming using Arduino, collaborative software development using GitHub, solderless electronics prototyping, electronic sensors, rapid prototyping, and small team management.
This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.

This course analyzes combinatorial problems and methods for their solution. Topics include: enumeration, generating functions, recurrence relations, construction of bijections, introduction to graph theory, network algorithms, and extremal combinatorics.