We are offering an opportunity for an honors experience this quarter in CSE143 led by Teaching Professor Stuart Reges. This is intended for students in the honors program and other high-achieving students. The students who participate will meet with me once a week in a small group to discuss a variety of topics. This is in addition to your normal CSE143 section.

Students accepted into the honors section will sign up for a special section of CSE390H. It will be a 1-unit class that is graded CR/NC. The main requirement is that you have to agree to show up each week and to participate in our discussions. To get the credit, you have to attend seven of the nine sessions we will have this quarter. Participating in this section will earn you an extra unit of credit and that unit of credit will be an honors credit. The Honors College has also agreed that students who complete CSE143 in conjunction with this seminar will received credit for one five-unit science or math course in the core (what they refer to as NW).

Students in the honors section will also read and discuss Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy by Batya Ungar-Sargon.

In terms of what other topics we'll discuss, it will be something of a grab-bag of topics. I should admit up front that I have an obsession with the concept of "meta" and I like to talk about it a lot. Here are some examples of things I've discussed with honors students before:

• What is a computer? What is computation? How does this relate to meta?
• What happened to the mathematicians in the early part of the twentieth century when they turned to meta-mathematics? Potential topics here include: Goedel's incompleteness theorem (the idea, not a formal proof), the Liar's paradox, Russell's set paradox, etc.
• Alan Turing wrote a paper in 1936 about "computable numbers." Once you understand the idea of countable versus uncountable infinities and the implications of Turing's work, you'll come to realize that most real numbers are not computable. What does that mean? This is actually something that worried Kurt Goedel.
• I often talk about puzzles. For example, I bring in a Rubik's cube and talk about its properties. How many possible states are there for the cube? If you were to pull it apart into "sub-cubes" and put it back together, would it be legal? I have lots of other puzzles that can be fun to explore.
• I find it useful to compare the intellectual atmosphere that existed in 1900 with the intellectual atmosphere today. For example, they had much more belief in science, progress, truth. Now their ideas seem limited and they seem arrogant for being so sure they were right. But aren't we meta-arrogant in that we're arrogant about our lack of arrogance? We don't seem to believe in anything today. The only thing we're sure of is that we're not sure of anything. We know more about science now than they did, but they believed in science more than we do. Why?
• I'm very interested in the question of the nature of human intelligence. I like the theory of memes, for example, although I have a slightly different take on it. Basically, I think that what makes human minds so special is that we are very good at simulating other minds (in other words, we have meta-minds). I think this tells us a lot about human nature.
• I don't do formal research, but my area of expertise is computer science education, particularly at the intro level. There is a lot of discussion going on right now about what we should teach in intro and how we should teach it. It's clear from my own surveys and observations of cse142 and cse143 students that there is a huge gender gap at uw with a much higher percentage of the top-scoring men intending to major in cs than is true of the top-scoring women. Why is that? What can we do about it? Should we do something about it? These are questions that I consider all the time and I enjoy getting the perspective of honors students.

If you are interested, please fill out this application by Tuesday, 1/11, at 10 am. I will inform students by Wednesday if they have been accepted into the honors section.