Internship in Mathematics
Provides academic credit for students pursuing internships to gain practical experience in the applications of mathematical concepts and methods.
January IAP 2008 · Street-Fighting Mathematics
This course teaches the art of guessing results and solving problems without doing a proof or an exact calculation. Techniques include extreme-cases reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization, generalization, and pictorial analysis. Applications include mental calculation, solid geometry, musical intervals, logarithms, integration, infinite series, solitaire, and differential equations. **(No epsilons or deltas are harmed by taking this course.)** 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.
Readings
Prerequisites & course information
Prereq: Permission of instructor U (Fall, IAP, Summer) Units arranged [P/D/F] Can be repeated for credit.
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026–2027
- MIT OpenCourseWare ↗January IAP 2008
- MIT OCW syllabus ↗
- MIT OCW readings ↗
- Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.