Reviews for MATH464

Information Review
Radu Balan
MATH464

Expecting a B
Anonymous
04/01/2024
Lectures can be difficult to follow as he trails off into mumbling or side tangents into content that isn't relevant to the coursework. Coursework is designed to be encouraging memorizing trivia rather than memorizing problem solving tools. If you are an extreme math enthusiast and spend 20+ hours a week studying and understanding the content, he will be a decent professor. If you are a normal student with a life and other things to worry about, avoid this professor.
Todd Rowland
MATH464

Anonymous
05/20/2023
Super nice professor.
Todd Rowland
MATH464

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/23/2021
He hosted office hours 4/5 days of the week and provides practice exams for each midterm and the final. The grading on tests is very fair, and the lowest homework and half of lowest midterm were dropped. The only criticism I would give is that the lecture was not very engaging and there was too much emphasis on computer demonstrations in Mathematica.
Tobias von Petersdorff
MATH464

Anonymous
05/18/2021
At the beginning of the semester there were quizzes based on each class, which was fine, but those stopped after the first few weeks. The problem was there were almost no practice problems or homework's the entire semester. He decided to assign our only homework during finals weeks and it was worth 30% of our grade. He finally provided a few practice problems for the final exam, but most of the class was unprepared for the final since we'd had almost no other practice with the material all semester. Although the theory was well explained, he did almost no examples in class, so no one in the class really learned anything. The whole semester was basically a waste. Would not take this guy again or advise anyone who wants to learn the material NOT to take him.
Kasso Okoudjou
MATH464

Expecting an A
skinter
05/21/2012
First of all: accent and handwriting are difficult at first, but most people were able to get used to it; if you can't, find a different prof. Otherwise, Prof Okoudjou is excellent. Explains fully, very helpful with questions. Exams extremely straightforward and he did a ton of practice for them. Strongly recommended.
Wojciech Czaja
MATH464

Expecting a B
Anonymous
12/02/2010
Czaja did a very good job of explaining the conceptual basis of Fourier, wavelet, and wavelet packet transforms. He also did a good job of keeping the target of any proof present in the students' minds, but sometimes proofs were a little hard to follow anyway, and some proofs left me with a feeling of "so what" afterward (that is, some proofs seemed to add nothing substantial to my understanding of the nature of the proven proposition - I would've been content with accepting a statement as true and perhaps seeing some cases of it being true or a brief explanation of the gist of the proof). It was also a little hard for me to discern what the instructor expected us to be learning at any given moment. It seemed the exams often were not clearly connected to lecture material (usually there was relevant class material that one could use to solve exam problems, but problems were often presented with notation that hadn't been used in class, such as the use of "inverse Fourier transform" instead of "synthesis formula", so some extra cognitive overhead had to be taken into account). Also, as a student who had no prior experience with Matlab, homework assignments to be complete in Matlab seemed a bit open-ended (though I scored highly on all the ones I've received back), and most of my challenge with the homework came not from my lack of understanding of the mathematical nature of any given transform but rather from particular difficulties of implementing them in Matlab (converting infinite sums over finitely supported sequences into finite sums, making sure that indices of sequences always started at 1 so that calls of values from a sequence would work, etc.). Overall, I learned a lot, and I thought a lot about transforms, but I also spent a lot of time thinking about things that seemed to have little to do with transforms.