MATH 115B
Linear Algebra
Description: Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour. Requisite: course 115A. Linear transformations, conjugate spaces, duality; theory of a single linear transformation, Jordan normal form; bilinear forms, quadratic forms; Euclidean and unitary spaces, symmetric skew and orthogonal linear transformations, polar decomposition. P/NP or letter grading.
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
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Winter 2021 - I'll start by saying that I thought the professor himself was a pretty great professor. He was clear, thorough, and always welcomes questions. Out of the professors I've had so far, he is definitely one of the better professors I've had. Now onto the bad part. Every quarter I feel like I've taken the hardest upper division math class yet, but this takes the cake so far. The most difficult part of the class was the midterms and finals. Granted, I took this during lockdown online, so if you're taking the class in person your experience may be different. Each midterm took approximately 12 hours (with breaks, and 8 hours without breaks. I timed it), and final is about 1.5 times longer. The exams don't actually have too many questions (5~6 for midterm, ~9 for final), but each question is well crafted to be entirely ungoogleable (as it should be) and very difficult. The class distribution for exams this year seemed to largely be a cluster of strong students getting 88%+, some students getting 70%~88%, and some getting below 40%. To the profressor's credit, he acknowledged that the exams are designed to be very difficult, and that he gets the impression the class had a group of particularly strong students, and that he would take that into account for the other students (positively i.e. not curving against them). I was consistently in the upper-middling group (~85%), averaged about 90% on all the homework and managed an A. tl;dr: professor and his teaching is great, but his exams are not so great
Winter 2021 - I'll start by saying that I thought the professor himself was a pretty great professor. He was clear, thorough, and always welcomes questions. Out of the professors I've had so far, he is definitely one of the better professors I've had. Now onto the bad part. Every quarter I feel like I've taken the hardest upper division math class yet, but this takes the cake so far. The most difficult part of the class was the midterms and finals. Granted, I took this during lockdown online, so if you're taking the class in person your experience may be different. Each midterm took approximately 12 hours (with breaks, and 8 hours without breaks. I timed it), and final is about 1.5 times longer. The exams don't actually have too many questions (5~6 for midterm, ~9 for final), but each question is well crafted to be entirely ungoogleable (as it should be) and very difficult. The class distribution for exams this year seemed to largely be a cluster of strong students getting 88%+, some students getting 70%~88%, and some getting below 40%. To the profressor's credit, he acknowledged that the exams are designed to be very difficult, and that he gets the impression the class had a group of particularly strong students, and that he would take that into account for the other students (positively i.e. not curving against them). I was consistently in the upper-middling group (~85%), averaged about 90% on all the homework and managed an A. tl;dr: professor and his teaching is great, but his exams are not so great
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