The course's title set great expectations.

The actual course has a narrower scope, usually this is just called "Formal Language, Automata and Complexity" or "Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science".

There are many genius ideas in computer science, e.g. divide and conquer, the various forms of abstraction (see SICP), some astonishing algorithms like Dijstra's, Kalman filters, MCMC, Viterbi's or Integer-Bresenham, or data structures like the Bloom filter or Kohonen maps; for an intro, have a look at A. K. Dewdney's book "The Turing Omnibus" for a fairly non-technical exposition of a broad range beyond TCS (beginner level, does not include most from my list here).