University College London

This course cover three important ideas in classical physics – Newton’s Laws of Motion, Newton’s Law of Gravitation and the Wave Equation. After considering analytical solutions to each, students look at computational solutions using the Python programming language (no background in coding is necessary) and touch on ideas such as dynamical systems and chaos. Students also look at solutions in different coordinate systems which give rise to familiar ideas such as Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and the inverse square law but from a first principles approach.

This course provides an introduction to epistemology and metaphysics. Topics to be discussed include the nature of knowledge, scepticism, the existence of God, whether theism is rational, why the universe exists, free will, personal identity, and the metaphysics of race.

This course focuses on the intersection of climate crisis, energy demand, buildings and the wellbeing of people. Students are introduced to key concepts and Open Access data and tools for modelling and analyzing building energy demand and occupant wellbeing at a large scale. Students learn to synthesize knowledge across disciplines to develop and evaluate strategies and comprehensive plans for sustainable urban living.

Few chapters in all of history are as dramatic—both tragic and spectacular--as modern Jewish history. The apparent success of Jewish emancipation was challenged by popular and religious non-Jewish opposition, and efforts among Jews to control or turn back such changes. No matter what, Judaism and Jews did not stand still. Antisemitism gained traction as reactionary utopia, along with the persistence of traditional prejudice and discrimination. Against this background there arose a variety of Jewish ideologies, including: Modern Orthodoxy, Reform Judaism, Zionism, Territorialism, Variants of socialism, "Ultra" orthodoxies, and National extremism. 

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Jewish life changed radically, and European Jewry came close to being totally wiped out in the Holocaust. Since the late eighteenth century, Jews had sought new ways to think about and live in the modern world. Numerous individuals of Jewish origin took the lead in attempting to understand the changes wrought by modernity—including: Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, Bertha Pappenheimer, Emma Goldman, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and Philip Roth. 

This course is about India from the 15th to the mid-18th centuries. This was a period of sometimes slow or subtle, occasionally cataclysmic, but often palpable transformation, and students examine the ways in which what people believed, where and how they lived, their relationship to the state and its power, and how they expressed themselves was changing. Although the course focuses first and foremost on India, by placing its history in its global context throughout this course, the class scrutinizes the emerging notion of a "global early modernity."

This course provides an introduction to the sub-discipline of urban geography. It explores the distinctive contribution that geographers have made to the analysis of cities and urban life. The course outlines the economic and social origins of urban life, exploring the relationship between population density, size, and diversity that characterise cities. The course systematically outlines how contemporary cities can be interpreted as economic spaces, social spaces, and political entities. It also explores the different ways that urban geographers and others have framed their research into cities and urban environments. Given that cities – for all their attractions and strengths – are frequently defined by their dysfunction and inequality, the course examines how such poor outcomes are generated. It also explores the kinds of policy programmes that might be capable of generating more liveable and equitable cities. The course takes a selfconsciously international perspective, encouraging participants to read widely about the diversity of cities that form the focus of urban geographical thinking today.

This course is an introduction to linguistic pragmatics, an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics which studies the relationship between language form and language use. It seeks to understand what it is to use language or what we do when we use language (Verschueren 1999). The course is divided into three units: the basic theoretical concepts in pragmatics, such as Grice’s maxims of conversation, conversational implicatures, deixis, and speech acts; key analytical (and contentious) issues such as salience and implicit meaning by analyzing different types of discourse; and the analysis of conversational interaction. Here, students explore such phenomena as turn-taking and preference structure, politeness phenomena, formulaic language, humor, and pragmatic/discourse markers. 

The Greek myths of gods, heroes, and heroines have played a crucial role in the history of Western art, literature, and music. This course examines Greek myths as found in Greek literary sources and provides students with an introduction to the study of Greek mythology in its literary, social, historical, and philosophical context.

Much of modern machine learning rests upon a range of mathematical methods and many introductory machine learning courses seek to introduce algorithms before ensuring the link with these methods is made. This course offers students an introduction to traditional Machine Learning in a rigorous mathematical fashion. Assuming a familiarity with key results of linear algebra, differential calculus, probability and statistics, the course introduces the key areas of traditional machine learning and seeks to cover the key tools (and theorems) within these areas, and to illustrate these with practical exemplars.