For the 15 students in a new interdisciplinary class this semester, the murals common throughout East Harlem have deeper meanings than passersby might realize.
Math, to a mathematician, is an aesthetic, creative endeavor. But for too many high school students, math has become a reviled, boring subject.It doesn’t have to be that way, as Steven Strogatz aims to show the students in his new College of Arts and Sciences course, Mathematical Explorations. The course fulfills the math distribution requirement and has attracted seniors who put off taking a math class as long as they could, as well as freshmen intrigued by the course’s title.
Although Katrine Bosley '90 doesn't get a lot of time to talk to patients as CEO of Editas Medicine, she relishes the opportunity."You only have to talk to one patient with one disease that you're working on to know why you go to work every day," says Bosley, whose company is working to translate genome editing technology into new drugs and treatments for poorly treated diseases and patients.
Brian Lukoff '04 loves math.This is not true for many Americans (30 percent according to a recent survey), who say they're just "not good at math."Lukoff thinks there's a way to change that statistic, believing that part of the problem is the way students are learning in math and other disciplines as well. He has developed a tool that helps teachers and professors gauge what their students know and address gaps right away.
The fearless honey badger steals lions' prey and gobbles cobras for dinner. Tenacious and determined, it devours honeycombs despite countless bee stings. This is the totem animal of Sally Wen Mao, MFA '13, and an inspiration for her first book of poems, "Mad Honey Symposium," published in May by Alice James Books.
“Welcome to Cornell Ruins National Park,” Adam T. Smith tells his students. “We’re lucky today. We have a cache of objects to examine discovered in the ruins of McGraw Hall.”This “Rise and Fall of ‘Civilization’” class examines traditional archaeological topics, like kingship and the origins of cities, partly by looking at our current civilization through the lens of a single site – the Cornell campus as it would look 1,000 years from now.
The scene is straight out of a disaster movie: melting glaciers wreaking havoc on the ecosystem, and a tundra-like wasteland where once forest reigned. Thirteen thousand years ago or so the spruces, firs and birches of central New York state vanished; dendrochronology researcher Carol Griggs '77, Ph.D. '06, is using ancient wood to figure out what happened when they finally reappeared.
A poor childhood in Guyana spent watching his mother get pushed around gave Frank Douglas, Ph.D. '73, M.D. '77, an early awareness of injustice. At age 12 he was challenging his school principal on fairness, despite the risk to his academic future.
Captain Lauren Morgens '02 stands on the quarterdeck surveying her ship, red sash around her waist and a tall feather in her pirate hat. It is a cloudy August afternoon in Lewes, Del.; her crew has finished scrubbing the Kalmar Nyckel's deck, and the last sailor has come off the rigging. Once the tall ship clears the shallows, Morgens' command to "set the mizzen" rings across the ship in a sing-song cadence that seems as old as the sea itself.
*//*-->*/Had it not been for the beauty of Cornell and a memorable weekend back in 1980, this story about Kathy Savitt '85, chief marketing officer for Yahoo, might very well be appearing in a publication for Harvard alumni.
The advent of queer theory “caused a shock wave which has affected all intellectual disciplines,” as Didier Eribon, a leading French intellectual, once said. A look back at the undergraduate years of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘71, a founder of queer theory, reveals a unique glimpse of where that shock wave first began.
Despite pandemic challenges, the College of Arts & Sciences expanded its faculty with 17 new hires this year, bringing exciting new ideas into wide-ranging fields, including moral psychology, Indigenous studies, cosmology, genetics and African American literature.
A U.S. delegation arrived in Taiwan to show support for the nation this week. Allen Carlson, associate professor of government and an expert on China, says Taiwan was on edge even before Russian President Vladimir Putin began his assault on Ukraine.
Gustavo Flores-Macias, professor of government, has studied the Colombian security tax, a levy on the economically elite that finances public safety.Growing up in Latin America at a time of drastic economic reforms wasn’t easy, says Gustavo Flores-Macías.Those reforms included privatization, trade and financial liberalization, and the elimination or reduction of government subsidies, all of which carried what Flores-Macías refers to as “distributive consequences.”
On Thursday, the Biden administration announced economic sanctions on Russia in retaliation for alleged election interference and cyberattacks. Nicholas Mulder, assistant professor of history, says the new sanctions are "signals, rather than immediate increases in pressure."
