Reviews for ASTR415

Information Review
Massimo Ricotti
ASTR415

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/16/2024
Dr. Ricotti is a fun and kind person, and I appreciated his patience with everyone as they tried to learn C. I think you definitely needed some C/C++ coding experience (and especially Python) before taking this course since the majority of it was teaching yourself (or having AI explain to you) C. The homeworks were fun, I wish lecture material coincided more with the material on our homeworks since the lectures were mostly the theory and math rather than how to code in C.
Derek Richardson
ASTR415

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
01/13/2021
Awesome teacher!! He really cares about his students and he will work with you through the homework and pre-class quizzes so that you can do well on them. The class isn't hard if you have some python knowledge, the only hard part imo is the pre-class quizzes. Also no midterm and no final!!
Massimo Ricotti
ASTR415

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/07/2010
While I can't say Dr. Ricotti is a bad teacher, I can't say he's excellent either. As a person, he is excellent. Really, really nice and funny, and even brought us cookies and cake a couple of times. While his lectures are extremely dry, that may have been just because the material, computational astrophysics, can be pretty dull when you study the algorithms closely. He is an extremely fair grader, however. He is very willing to give extensions, and really tries very hard to give good grades. The homework was very difficult, but again, that was probably because the material is difficult. To summarize - if you are interested in the subject, take his class. Otherwise you may find lectures to be very boring.