This is the catalog description of the freshman seminar I lead:
MIT will do a great job of teaching you how to solve technical problems accurately. This seminar is intended to discuss how to figure things out "close enough," without looking at textbooks or writing computer programs -- the art of estimation. We will talk about how accurately you really need to know things, order-of-magnitude estimates, how to check the results of detailed calculations, and how to do back-of-the-envelope calculations with or without an envelope. We'll also look at ways to design and build things when you don't really know all the input parameters as accurately as you might like.
--- Last modified 11/15/94 --- Eric W. Anderson --- ewanders@mit.edu