Modeling Environmental Complexity
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this undergraduate course on environmental systems that show organized structure alongside wide variability. Lessons move through physical, biological, and chemical case studies, pairing each with a theoretical model, to build general principles about how structure and organization arise in nature. Students learn to build minimal mathematical, physical, and computational models that answer specific questions about these systems rather than simulate every detail. The course is pitched at advanced undergraduates, with a parallel graduate version, 12.586, that assigns different problem sets. Materials include lecture notes, problem sets, and readings drawn from MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. No video lectures are included, but the full set of course materials is downloadable under a Creative Commons license, and there is no cost to access or work through them.