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Honors Admissions Office
777 Glades Road, SU 201
Boca Raton, FL 33431
561.297.3064
honors@fau.edu

Honors Advising Office
777 Glades Road, SU 201
Boca Raton, FL 33431
561.297.3064

Undergraduate Studies

Honors Seminars

Seminars Home - Fall 2011 Seminars

Spring 2012 Seminars

Mathematics and Its History, Daniela Popova
Intellectual Foundations Category: Global Perspective
Students will see how mathematics developed in different periods of time and cultures, and learn the interconnection between different areas in mathematics. They will explore who created what and when. At the same time, they will learn how to prove theorems. The course will examine such topics as Greek geometry, the concept of infinity in Greek mathematics, number theory in Asia, polynomial equations, analytic geometry, and infinite series.

Materials, Sustainability, and Environment, Chaouki Ghenai
Intellectual Foundations Category: Science and the Natural World
This course will introduce students in the University Honors Program to the methods and tools that will guide them in their analysis of the role of materials and processes selection in terms of embodied energy, carbon foot print, recycle fraction, toxicity and sustainability criteria. Topics covered in this course include: resource consumption and its drivers, materials property charts, the material life cycle eco-informed material selection, eco audits/life cycle analysis, sustainable energy and sustainable materials. The students will use CES EduPack software for better understanding of the issues, create material charts, perform materials and processes selection, and eco audit or life cycle analysis allowing alternative design choices to meet the design requirements and reduce the environmental burden.

Human Existence, Behavior, and Society, Simon Glynn
Intellectual Foundations Category: Society and Human Behavior
This honors seminar course raises fundamental philosophical questions, and encourages student investigation and discussion of the Nature and Origins of human Consciousness, Identity, Values and Beliefs, and the ways in which these motivate and guide our Choices, Behavior, Actions, and Socio-Cultural Interactions. We will examine the extent to which each of these is the Product, and to what extent each is Productive or Constitutive of Social and Cultural Structures, and the implications of all of this for the methods of the Human and Social Sciences. In this context fundamental philosophical questions, such as those concerning Free Will, the Relation of the Individual to Society, Human Responsibility, Moral Values and the Meaning and Purpose of Life will be raised and discussed.

Evolution for Everyone, Charles Dukes
Intellectual Foundations Category: Society and Human Behavior
Evolution for Everyone is a highly accessible course, for both science and non-science majors, intended to explore human-related affairs from an evolutionary perspective. A number of human-related issues will be reconsidered in light of evolution. By examining the ultimate (evolutionary) origins of human behavior, students will gain a different perspective on common human behavior (e.g., language, parenting). Specifically, the following topics will be addressed: cooperation, mate choice, parenting, pair bonding, aggression, language, and culture. It is intended that students will be able to identify and evaluate solutions to human-related affairs using evolution as a point of reference.

Issues in Artificial Intelligence, Fred Hoffman
Intellectual Foundations Category: Written Communication
In this course, students will investigate current as well as historical issues pertaining to Artificial Intelligence (AI), through accounts of important implementations of AI, as well as fictional and philosophical writings on AI. A minimum of technical information will be presented to enable students to understand the issues, and students will investigate their choice of technical, social, philosophical and literary aspects of AI, and will share their ideas.

Green Consciousness, Jane Caputi
Upper-division Substitution for a Lower Division Requirement
In this class we will look at American ecological identities-- values, attitudes and practices toward Nature (which includes non-human and human nature) -- as these identities are formed and influenced not only by our national experience but also by our understandings and experiences of gender, class and race. We examine mainstream as well as marginalized American cultures and inherited traditions regarding individualism, property rights, consumerism, hygiene, sustainability, sexuality, the nature of animals, and the place of humans in the given world. We will pay particular attention to the ideas and practices of Native American cultures and the theoretical and activist orientations of ecofeminism and environmental justice. As students examine the values, attitudes and practices that mark the contemporary American environmental experience, the hope is that you gain an understanding of how and why our society is sustainable or not, how we make choices that impact the environment and how our attitudes and actions, from the most everyday to those on the largest scale, affect humans as well as animals and other elements of non-human nature and how these, in turn, affect humans.