Twelve weeks in three acts, each introducing one new rule for deciding who goes first.

Lectures#

Twelve lectures, in three acts. Act I is the physics — why queues form, how to measure one from the outside, and what waiting costs. Act II is five ordering rules, one a week, each of which buys something and charges somebody. Act III is what happens when the queue turns out to be connected to other queues and full of people who have worked out what you are doing.

Every week carries a simulation you can drive yourself, set in a real place — a café you rearrange, an airport line you measure two ways, an aircraft at a gate, a dialysis unit where the rule decides who lives. They are not illustrations of the argument. In several cases the simulation is what corrected it, and each lecture says so where it happened.

Every week also has a slide deck, linked at the top of its page and carrying the same live simulation, so the lecture in the room and the lecture on the site are the same lecture rather than two accounts of it.

Allow twenty minutes a week: about fifteen to read, and the rest for the controls, which is where most of the actual learning is.

If you want to see how the weeks depend on each other before reading any of them, the shape of the semester lays out the chain and shows where the four pieces of assessment fall against it.