Art of Problem Solving will be launching a brand-new class this summer: Mathematical Tapas. This class is designed to be a fun colloquium-style course for advanced students to take over the summer. The topics are designed to be self-contained, one or two week fun subjects. Math classes, for the most part, tend to be a lot of math for math's sake ("What's wrong with that?" you might be thinking). If you get too close to a subject, it's hard to talk about how what you're doing fits into the grand design. Most interesting mathematics is too inter-disciplinary. Even though you need spheres and parametric curves and planar graphs and vector fields to study algebraic topology, a teacher can't tell a student of geometry or algebra or graph theory or calculus that they'll need these things in algebraic topology. It wouldn't make sense without those other tools as well.

The main goal of this course is to find as many places as we can in modern, living, people-actually-care-about-this mathematics that are reachable from where our students are now. Mathematical Tapas is designed as a sampling meant to give the student a taste of how broad and varied mathematics truly is.

The class will be presented colloquium-style, meaning each topic will be self-contained (although there will be several neat threads winding through the course). Specifically, the course fits nicely into a hectic summer schedule. There will be no challenge sets, but each week we'll assign problems ranging in difficulty from minutes to months of work. A student who spends three hours a week on this course should get a tremendous amount out of it, but most weeks will open the door to months of distraction for the curious student. We expect that some students will take a trip with Godel in Week 1 or wander off into Cryptographyland in week 3 and only wander out for brief spells on Mondays at 9pm ET for about two hours.