NU Splash Biography

How can a traveling salesman find the shortest path through every major city? How do colonies of amoeba find the food they need to survive? Although these seem like very different problems, they actually share a common solution! Even though we think of computer science as a human invention, many of the problems that we use computers to solve have in fact already been figured out by other living things. In this class, we'll take a look at the different ways that the study of biology and computer science have influenced each other over the years and look forward to ways in which biological principles might be used to design the computers of tomorrow.

In a world that seems to be drifting towards a future that is controlled more and more by computer algorithms, it has become equally important for scientists, humanists, programmers and poets to all interact with and develop these new technologies. However, this relationship between literature and computation is almost as old as language itself. In this class, we'll explore some of the different ways in which these two radically different cultures have influenced each other throughout history, and speculate on where the future might take us.