I took this class (in '97 IIRC), it was called "Nature of Math". I took it because I loved his songs and wanted to take a few math classes that weren't very hard. (from a comment I made a few years ago on a previous thread: Wonderful course and his delivery was excellent. I almost ended up being the TA the next quarter. It was my introduction to many things, including birthday paradox and analytic solutions for tertiary equations.)
> Yep! He went into detail about the whole mathematical competition and how (IIRC) there's no general solution for quintics.
Yes, that's exactly right—no solution of the general quintic in terms of radicals. This study introduced the term "soluble", and the group-theoretic version of the insolubility of the general quintic boils down to the fact that S_5 is not soluble, whereas S_2, S_3, and S_4 all are.
