PHYSICS 131
Mathematical Methods of Physics
Description: Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour. Requisites: courses 1A, 1B, and 1C (or 1AH, 1BH, and 1CH), Mathematics 32B, 33A, 33B. Vectors and fields in space, linear transformations, matrices, and operators; Fourier series and integrals. P/NP or letter grading.
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
2 of 2
Most Helpful Review
Winter 2020 - As a person, I really want to like Putterman. But unfortunately I cannot because this class destroyed my happiness. It was obnoxiously hard and I was miserable every moment I spent thinking about it. Maybe I learned enough to help in the long run but honestly I barely understood anything. The material we learned was drastically different from what I've heard others learned with a different professor. If you're someone that actually understood what was happening then yeah this class was probably really helpful. Unfortunately that's not me. The lectures were often impossible to follow and everything was way too fast. I ended up having to teach myself most of the course from the textbook (which was not very good) and the TA's office hours (which were amazing).
Winter 2020 - As a person, I really want to like Putterman. But unfortunately I cannot because this class destroyed my happiness. It was obnoxiously hard and I was miserable every moment I spent thinking about it. Maybe I learned enough to help in the long run but honestly I barely understood anything. The material we learned was drastically different from what I've heard others learned with a different professor. If you're someone that actually understood what was happening then yeah this class was probably really helpful. Unfortunately that's not me. The lectures were often impossible to follow and everything was way too fast. I ended up having to teach myself most of the course from the textbook (which was not very good) and the TA's office hours (which were amazing).
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2016 - Samani is a really good lecturer and teacher. His lectures are interesting and he stays on topic in class. He also wrote his own lecture notes for this class which replaced the need for a textbook. His notes are actually pretty short, but very concise and basically everything you need to know for the tests. With that said, his tests are still pretty hard. Great professor overall.
Fall 2016 - Samani is a really good lecturer and teacher. His lectures are interesting and he stays on topic in class. He also wrote his own lecture notes for this class which replaced the need for a textbook. His notes are actually pretty short, but very concise and basically everything you need to know for the tests. With that said, his tests are still pretty hard. Great professor overall.
AD
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2020 - Here's my advice for this class: don't take this class. Prof Wang could NOT care less about her students and I learned nothing from her. She reads her lecture notes to us by scrolling through a pdf of her scanned notes from years ago, which is just a harder to read version of the textbook. If you care about your education at all, don't do it, I don't even know what else to say because this quarter had me speechless. I'll summarize: -she's almost always late to class, record being 20 minutes or something -class just cuts out sometimes because of her internet issues, and she will tell you she's going to upload a recording for you to watch, but she won't -doesn't show up to her OH sometimes -cancelled class two(?) times for unknown reasons even though we ended up being so behind that she dropped the whole unit of tensor analysis -spent half a quarter on math 32 stuff which everyone already learned, rushed through Fourier/Laplace which is new, dropped everything else (tensors, PDEs, etc.) Basically all you have to do in this class is skim the textbook before exams and do the HW since most of the quarter is review. I can't think of a single reason why you would take this class with her unless this is the last class you need to graduate and you just want an easy A.
Fall 2020 - Here's my advice for this class: don't take this class. Prof Wang could NOT care less about her students and I learned nothing from her. She reads her lecture notes to us by scrolling through a pdf of her scanned notes from years ago, which is just a harder to read version of the textbook. If you care about your education at all, don't do it, I don't even know what else to say because this quarter had me speechless. I'll summarize: -she's almost always late to class, record being 20 minutes or something -class just cuts out sometimes because of her internet issues, and she will tell you she's going to upload a recording for you to watch, but she won't -doesn't show up to her OH sometimes -cancelled class two(?) times for unknown reasons even though we ended up being so behind that she dropped the whole unit of tensor analysis -spent half a quarter on math 32 stuff which everyone already learned, rushed through Fourier/Laplace which is new, dropped everything else (tensors, PDEs, etc.) Basically all you have to do in this class is skim the textbook before exams and do the HW since most of the quarter is review. I can't think of a single reason why you would take this class with her unless this is the last class you need to graduate and you just want an easy A.
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2018 - If you can, try to get a different professor for this course. I never really learned the material during lecture, Zocchi is an okay guy but not much of a teacher, could hardly hold my attention, and rarely answered questions. I just went to lecture to get my notes and then learned the materialfrom the TA and on my own. Zocchi also went over the most important part of the course in the last week of class, but told us specifically that he wouldn't test on it, so me and many other students did not learn it. Anyway, from simply studying the few homework problems he gave and reviewing the notes I was able to get a B, but if you want an A you'll probably need to study a lot or example problems from the book (which he hardly follows, and the sections are sometimes difficult to find), and make sure you know ALL the notes. And his exams only have 4 questions, each question worth 5 points, so each point is worth almost a percent.
Fall 2018 - If you can, try to get a different professor for this course. I never really learned the material during lecture, Zocchi is an okay guy but not much of a teacher, could hardly hold my attention, and rarely answered questions. I just went to lecture to get my notes and then learned the materialfrom the TA and on my own. Zocchi also went over the most important part of the course in the last week of class, but told us specifically that he wouldn't test on it, so me and many other students did not learn it. Anyway, from simply studying the few homework problems he gave and reviewing the notes I was able to get a B, but if you want an A you'll probably need to study a lot or example problems from the book (which he hardly follows, and the sections are sometimes difficult to find), and make sure you know ALL the notes. And his exams only have 4 questions, each question worth 5 points, so each point is worth almost a percent.
2 of 2
