This seminar offers a course of readings in lyric poetry. It aims to enhance the student’s capacity to understand the nature of poetic language and the enjoyment of poetic texts by treating poems as messages to be deciphered.
The seminar will briefly touch upon the history of theories of figurative language since Aristotle and it will attend to the development of those theories during the last thirty years, noting the manner in which they tended to consider figures of speech distinct from normative or literal expression, and it will devote particular attention to the rise of theories that quarrel with this distinction.
The seminar also aims to communicate a rough sense of the history of English-speaking poetry since the early modern period. Some attention will be paid as well to the use of metaphor in science.

This course introduces the practice and theory of literary criticism. The seminar focuses on topics such as the history of critical methods and techniques, and the continuity of certain subjects in literary history. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication is a major component of the course. Other components include theory and use of figurative language and reading poetry.

Alienation, overcrowding, sensory overload, homelessness, criminality, violence, loneliness, sprawl, blight. How have the realities of city living influenced literature’s formal and thematic techniques? How useful is it to think of literature as its own kind of “map” of urban space? Are cities too grand, heterogeneous, and shifting to be captured by writers? In this seminar we will seek answers to these questions in key city literature, and in theoretical works that endeavor to understand the culture of cities.

How does one writer use another writer’s work? Does it matter if one author has been dead 300 years? What difference does it make if she’s a groundbreaking twentieth-century feminist and the writer she values has come to epitomize the English literary tradition? How can a novelist borrow from plays and poems? By reading Virginia Woolf’s major novels and essays in juxtaposition with some of the Shakespeare plays that (depending on one’s interpretation) haunt, enrich, and/or shape her writing, we will try to answer these questions and raise others. Readings in literary criticism, women’s studies, and other literary texts will complement our focus on the relationship–across time, media, and gender–between Shakespeare and Woolf. As a seminar, we will work to become more astute readers of literature within its historical, artistic, and political contexts, and consider how literature both reflects and contributes to these societal frameworks. Central texts will include Shakespeare’s Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale, and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Between the Acts. This subject is an advanced seminar in both the Literature and the Women’s Studies Program.

Topic: The English sense of humor. This course examines English literature across genre and historical periods. It is designed for students who want to study English literature or writing in some depth, or to know more about English literary culture and history. Students will also learn about the relationships between literary themes, forms, and conventions and the times in which they were produced. Materials include: Medieval tales, riddles, and character sketches; Renaissance lyrics and a play, 18th-century satires in words and images, 19th century irony, modern stories and film.

Our subject is the ethics of leadership, an examination of the principles appealed to by executive authority when questions arise about its sources and its legitimacy. Most treatments of this subject resort to case-studies in order to illustrate the application of ethical principles to business situations, but our primary emphasis will be upon classic works of imaginative literature, which convey more directly than case-studies the ethical pressures of decision-making. Readings will include works by Shakespeare, Sophocles, Shaw, E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Henrik Ibsen, among others. Topics to be discussed include the sources of authority, the management of consensus, the ideal of vocation, the ethics of deception, the morality of expediency, the requirements of hierarchy, the virtues and vices of loyalty, the relevance of ethical principles in extreme situations.

The aim of this subject is to acquaint the student with some important works of systematic ethical philosophy and to bring to bear the viewpoint of those works on the study of classic works of literature. This subject will trace the history of ethical speculation in systematic philosophy by identifying four major positions: two from the ancient world and the two most important traditions of ethical philosophy since the renaissance. The two ancient positions will be represented by Plato and Aristotle, the two modern positions by Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill. We will try to understand these four positions as engaged in a rivalry with one another, and we will also engage with the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, which offers a bridge between ancient and modern conceptions and provides a source for the rivalry between the viewpoints of Kant and Mill. Further, we will be mindful that the modern positions are subject to criticism today by new currents of philosophical speculation, some of which argue for a return to the positions of Plato and Aristotle.

In this course we will cover central aspects of modern formal logic, beginning with an explanation of what constitutes good reasoning. Topics will include validity and soundness of arguments, formal derivations, truth-functions, translations to and from a formal language, and truth-tables. We will thoroughly cover sentential calculus and predicate logic, including soundness and completeness results.

This course begins with an introduction to the theory of computability, then proceeds to a detailed study of its most illustrious result: Kurt Gödel’s theorem that, for any system of true arithmetical statements we might propose as an axiomatic basis for proving truths of arithmetic, there will be some arithmetical statements that we can recognize as true even though they don’t follow from the system of axioms. In my opinion, which is widely shared, this is the most important single result in the entire history of logic, important not only on its own right but for the many applications of the technique by which it’s proved. We’ll discuss some of these applications, among them: Church’s theorem that there is no algorithm for deciding when a formula is valid in the predicate calculus; Tarski’s theorem that the set of true sentence of a language isn’t definable within that language; and Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, which says that no consistent system of axioms can prove its own consistency.

The class will cover quantitative techniques of Operations Research with emphasis on applications in transportation systems analysis (urban, air, ocean, highway, pick-up and delivery systems) and in the planning and design of logistically oriented urban service systems (e.g., fire and police departments, emergency medical services, emergency repair services). It presents a unified study of functions of random variables, geometrical probability, multi-server queueing theory, spatial location theory, network analysis and graph theory, and relevant methods of simulation. There will be discussion focused on the difficulty of implementation, among other topics.

Quantitative techniques of operations research with emphasis on applications in transportation systems analysis (urban, air, ocean, highway, and pickup and delivery systems) and in the planning and design of logistically oriented urban service systems (e.g., fire and police departments, emergency medical services, and emergency repair services). Unified study of functions of random variables, geometrical probability, multi-server queuing theory, spatial location theory, network analysis and graph theory, and relevant methods of simulation. Computer exercises and discussions of implementation difficulties.

This subject is a survey of the fundamental analytic tools, approaches, and techniques which are useful in the design and operation of logistics systems and integrated supply chains. The material is taught from a managerial perspective, with an emphasis on where and how specific tools can be used to improve the overall performance and reduce the total cost of a supply chain. We place a strong emphasis on the development and use of fundamental models to illustrate the underlying concepts involved in both intra and inter-company logistics operations.
While our main objective is to develop and use models to help us analyze these situations, we will make heavy use of examples from industry to provide illustrations of the concepts in practice. This is neither a purely theoretical nor a case study course, but rather an analytical course that addresses real problems found in practice.

This course surveys operations research models and techniques developed for a variety of problems arising in logistical planning of multi-echelon systems. There is a focus on planning models for production/inventory/distribution strategies in general multi-echelon multi-item systems. Topics include vehicle routing problems, dynamic lot sizing inventory models, stochastic and deterministic multi-echelon inventory systems, the bullwhip effect, pricing models, and integration problems arising in supply chain management. Probability and linear programming experience required.

This course begins with a comparative review of conventional and advanced multiple attribute decision making (MADM) models in engineering practice. Next, a new application of particular MADM models in reliable material selection of sensitive structural components as well as a multi-criteria Taguchi optimization method is discussed. Other specific topics include dealing with uncertainties in material properties, incommensurability in decision-makers opinions for the same design, objective ways of weighting performance indices, rank stability analysis, compensations and non-compensations.
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.

The aim of the Portfolio Seminar is to assist in developing a critical position in relationship to their design work. By engaging multiple forms of representation, written and visual, students will explore methods that facilitate describing and representing their design work. Through a critical assessment of their existing portfolios, students will first be challenged to articulate design theses and interests in their past projects. Different mediums of representation will then be studied in order to hone an understanding of the relationship between form and content, and more specifically, the understanding of particular modes of representation as different filters through which their work can be read. Some of the questions that will be addressed are:

How does one go about describing an image?
How does one theorize representation?
How does one articulate a design thesis in writing verses visual media?
How can the two interact to enhance each other?
How do different media, printed verses web publishing, affect the representation of work?
How is your work best communicated?

This International Study Tour went to New Zealand during the first half of the 2016 Spring semester and travel during the Sloan Innovation Period. International Study Tours provide students with a course credit opportunity to identify and address issues about which they feel particularly passionate. After classroom sessions featuring faculty, industry, and cultural experts, students embark on site visits to their destination of choice, meeting with industry and government leaders, as well as local alumni. Through these visits, students are able to build on the preparatory course work with an in-depth exploration of industries, companies, and countries they have visited.
This course fulfills the Sloan Innovation Period (SIP) elective requirement. SIP occurs at the midpoint of each semester providing students with an intensive week of experiential leadership learning, as well as exposure to groundbreaking faculty work. It allows students to engage in intellectual exploration outside the classroom. SIP degree requirements include core courses in ethics and leadership as well as electives.

This series helps learners understand magnetoencephalography (MEG) signals through the lens of source estimation, decoding, and connectivity: principles, pitfalls, and perspectives.
MEG methodological approaches have grown remarkably during the 50-year history of MEG. A breadth of source estimation tools can localize brain activity even in challenging situations. Pattern analysis of brain activity can perform feats of mind reading by revealing what a person is seeing, perceiving, attending to, or remembering. Functional connectivity approaches can assess the role of large-scale brain networks in cognitive function. The aim of this workshop is to deconstruct these tools, overview the challenges and limitations, and demonstrate MEG data analysis procedures to a novice researcher.
This workshop was sponsored by the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM), a multi-institutional NSF Science and Technology Center headquartered at MIT that is dedicated to the study of intelligence—how the brain produces intelligent behavior and how we may be able to replicate intelligence in machines.

This course discusses MHD equilibria in cylindrical, toroidal, and noncircular tokamaks. It covers derivation of the basic MHD model from the Boltzmann equation, use of MHD equilibrium theory in poloidal field design, MHD stability theory including the Energy Principle, interchange instability, ballooning modes, second region of stability, and external kink modes. Emphasis is on discovering configurations capable of achieving good confinement at high beta.

MICRO is the Materials Initiative for Comprehensive Research Opportunity created to provide a remote research and education experience to undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds. This site includes mentoring resources and online materials science curriculum provided for self-study in the program.

To inform and empower the public on the complex issue of climate change, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created a Climate Portal, an online home for timely, science-based information about the causes and consequences of climate change—and what can be done to address it. Whether you are new to climate change or ready for a deeper exploration, the MIT Climate Portal offers a virtual place to ground your knowledge and ask your questions of experts. It also highlights MIT’s latest climate change research and initiatives for action.
The MIT Climate Portal is managed by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, with support from the MIT Office of the Vice President for Research.