The only CS class I ever took was Huffman's "Cybernetics" (undergrad UCSC CS class) and it was a real mind-blower. The very first day he dove right into sphere

The only CS class I ever took was Huffman's "Cybernetics" (undergrad UCSC CS class) and it was a real mind-blower. The very first day he dove right into sphere packing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_packing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_packing) and the whole course was a great introduction to information theory. I remember him describing how he wrote the original solution for huffman compression, crumpled it up, threw it away, and then retrieved it from the trash. I failed the class which led to a huge imposter syndrome in me that pushed me to learn far more CS than I ever needed to know. Huffman was definitely an arrogant bastard, but he certainly taught me a lot of interesting math.