Reviews for MATH416

Information Review
Wojciech Czaja
MATH416

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
02/20/2024
416 content is definitely challenging but Czaja explains it very well. Content is genuinely interesting. He writes exams so that all questions have 2-3 line simple (elegant) answers, especially proofs, but if you don't catch it at the moment exams are hard. Cheat sheet is allowed and he drops one midterm. Getting a good grade in this class isn't hard if you keep up with homework and average 70s on exams. He changed the final to be optional for our class.
Stefan Doboszczak
MATH416

Expecting a B
Anonymous
05/17/2021
Very generous with grading. Any homework if you emailed him he would give you an extension. Office hour appointments out of scheduled times if you asked, and generous test grading. Very fair teacher for a wicked hard class.
Charles Levermore
MATH416

Expecting an A
Anonymous
06/29/2020
Levermore is cool - as long as you can endure his snarky attitude. His lecture is fine, but I find the pace a bit slow. That said, this man should be banned from teaching new courses. He couldn't finish writing the homework on time for most of the time of the semester, so we had 5 psets for spring break and 4 psets for final's week. That was just not very reasonable. The exams were take-homes because of the pandemic. While the first exam was long and easy (the format was similar to the hw with the workload doubled), the second one was really tedious (he picked the hardest + longest problem from each hw and compiled them together). That was one of the instances when I look at my solution and wonder how on earth would the instructor have the mental power to read through my solution. He graded things very leniently at the end, I'm not sure if it was because he felt sorry for the way he bombarded us with giant hw packages or he's just lenient. Anyway.. the material is very interesting, I recommend learning some harmonic analysis on your own if you get a chance. The text used was Wickerhauser - alright but not the best for self-study (<- so you can't learn everything by reading the book and not attending lectures).
Wojciech Czaja
MATH416

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/10/2019
For this class, he's honestly a really good lecturer. He explains how things came to be and why things matter, which is always a good thing when introducing left field concepts. So I enjoyed his lectures a lot. Overall the class is pretty straightforward in the content, as his lecture notes span maybe 30 or 40 pages for the entire course (of course, they are not fully complete). He also allows for students to make up grades with an extra-credit project worth around 10%, but the project comes with very high standards. The exams are what I call "troll": as a veteran student of mathematics they consist of various little tricks which are decently easy to see if you are decently mathematically mature and which seem intractable if you are not, which is why the exam averages are 60-70%. Overall the course is interesting and I would recommend people take it for an elective or something like that.