Offered at Swarthmore
Deciding, Designing, Predicting: Mathematics in Everyday Life
Deb Bergstrand, professor of mathematics and statistics
Meets Mondays, 7–9:30 p.m.
Feb. 6 to April 2 (but not March 5)

How surprised should we be by amazing coincidences? Can we always determine the true winner of an election? How safe is air travel? How can we fairly divide desirable goods, like cake or land? Can we tile the bathroom floor so there is no repeated pattern? Is there a difference between insurance and gambling in Atlantic City? Mathematics helps us answer questions both serious and frivolous and even gives us tools to determine when a question has no exact answer.

Renaissance and Baroque in European Art
Michael Cothren, Scheuer Family Professor of the Humanities
Meets Wednesdays, 7–9:30 p.m.
Feb. 8 to April 4 (but not March 7)

This course surveys major works of European art from the 14th through the 17th centuries, concentrating on the artists who pioneered, established, and developed the cultural movements we refer to as Renaissance and Baroque.

Murder, Madness, Insurrection: Tragic Schism in Russian Society
Thompson Bradley, Professor Emeritus of Russian
Meets Thursdays, 7–9:30 p.m.
Feb. 9 to April 5 (but not March 8th)

This course will explore how the Russian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries struggled to understand and reveal the deep split in the Russian personality and to discover its causes. Authors will include: Aleksandr Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Andrei Bely, Nikolay Gogol, and Anna Akhmatova.

Offered in New York City at the Support Center for Nonprofit Management, 305 Seventh Avenue
James Joyce’s Ulysses
Philip Weinstein, Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of Literature
Meets Thursdays, 6:45–to 9:15
March 15 to May 3
Arguably the supreme novel written in English in the 20th century, Ulysses delights even as it daunts. Our aim is to grasp, increasingly, how it “moves,” what it is about, and why it matters.