The sciences and the humanities have not enjoyed the merriest of relationships in the modern era, but it didn’t used to be that way. Aristotle’s lectures on poetics and the natural sciences defined thought on the disciplines for centuries. As recently as a couple hundred years ago, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was emboldened to write on optics and color theory. Soon after that point, though, the accumulation of knowledge in the sciences made it a prohibitive endeavor for part-timers. In the other direction, the ambiguity that is often part and parcel of literature and the arts can be irksome for those studying hard sciences.

Enter Jorge Luis Borges. The Argentinian (1899-1986) was one of the most enigmatic writers of the 20th century. His stories — brief, compressed masterpieces of imagination and wonder — are full of riddles and paradoxes.

Borges is the ideal fiction writer to inspire fruitful conversations across disciplines, says Luciano Martínez, professor of Spanish, who recently concluded a three-year term as chair of the Arts and Humanities Division, and is a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Taiwan for the 2025–26 academic year.

“Borges has this ability to transform philosophical and scientific ideas into imaginative narratives,” he says. “What the students find is that in Borges, while there is such an appreciation for science and knowledge, he doesn’t use science to write traditional essays. Instead, he draws on concepts from science and the humanities in order to write fiction.”

For the past three years, Martínez has been teaching Reading Borges: Labyrinths and Forking Paths, which has drawn students from both the humanities and STEM. The result is a forum for conversation on some of the fundamental questions of humanity, debated by students pursuing a wide variety of majors.

“We had a group of students with very diverse interests — from philosophy to engineering to physics and Spanish — and a wonderful teacher,” says Noah Edgar ’25, an engineering and economics major from Salt Lake City. “The in-class discussions were fascinating.”

Edgar is far from alone in his assessment. Students who have taken the class, many of whom learned about it through word of mouth, recount how engaging the subject matter is, and the benefits of speaking with classmates in different disciplines.

“The discussions were always thought-provoking, and everyone came in with different academic backgrounds and cultural perspectives,” says Eleanor Xu ’28, from Beijing. “I loved that I wasn’t just learning from the professor or the readings, but also, and more often, from my classmates. Their insights and interpretations really pushed me to see things in completely new ways.”

Borges’ writing often has a foot in both science and poetry, the empirical and the imaginative. In one of his most renowned short stories, “The Library of Babel,” (1941), Borges posits a massive library of books, each with 410 pages, that contain every possible combination of 25 characters filling the books. From this deceptively simple thought experiment, Borges opens the door to reflections on information science, the infinite, the nature of meaning, and more.

Luciano Martínez

“[Liberal arts] should  be about developing curious, adaptable thinkers who can move fluidly between ideas,” he says, “and this course creates opportunities for interdisciplinary exploration, and provides a framework where students can explore complex questions at the intersection of multiple fields.”

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“‘The Library of Babel’ offers a great connection to computer science via its insights into information retrieval and data generation,” says economics and computer science major Zane Kleinberg ’25, of New York City. “I was working on a project in a computer science course related to producing words and meaning in randomly generated texts this semester, and couldn’t help but point out the similarity to this piece to my professor.”

Each time he offers the course, Martínez starts the students off with “On Exactitude in Science,” (1946) a trenchant, one-paragraph story by Borges that describes the development of a map that ends up being the size of the territory it represents.

“They get that story so quickly and they say, ‘Oh, this is so fun,’” Martínez says. “But then what happens? One student says, this is an absurd story, the map is useless because it’s so exact. Another says it’s about the signifier and the signified overlapping, or reality being overshadowed by its own representation. So there’s a deep and reflective engagement with a story written by an Argentine writer 80 years ago.”

For Martínez, this is the essence of the liberal arts education.

“It should be about developing curious, adaptable thinkers who can move fluidly between ideas,” he says, “and this course creates opportunities for interdisciplinary exploration, and provides a framework where students can explore complex questions at the intersection of multiple fields.”

Engineering major Brandon Knights ’26 described the critical thinking required in the class as salutary. “It requires us to reach in ourselves and find our own interpretations. We all come into class and dive deeper into the writing,” says Knights, an economics major from Brooklyn. “There were no right answers. You can read every story of his from a different angle and with a different lens.”

Ingrid Hsu ’28, who is studying computer science and philosophy, said most of the people in her class were from STEM fields.

“This course was very interesting in that if we did talk about technology, it wasn’t always just AI. It was about technology as a broader concept for things that society uses and develops,” says Hsu, of Cambridge, Mass. “It made for a different kind of discussion, and it’s one of the reasons I’m so happy I chose to come to a liberal arts college.”

Learn more about the department of Spanish