MATH 4651

Wonderful (yeah she really is) professor and interesting material. Extremely well organized. Very fair grading.

This class was phenomenal. The instructor was extremely accommodating, understanding, and fostered a very strong environment for the class to understand the material. The lectures were succinct, very well structured, and gave deep insight into the theorems and problems we dealt with.

The homework assignments were a lot of work, but well worth the time and effort you put into them. I felt myself become a better mathematical thinker through doing the homework assignments. Our class also had a very strong group chat that powered through tougher homework problems together.

The exams were long, but of the same format as the homework assignments. They were difficult, but not unreasonably so, and we had 24 hours to complete them.

Overall, this course challenged my ability to think mathematically and helped me develop a great deal of confidence for pursuing future math courses. I highly recommend this course, especially with Professor Gazaki.

This course was fantastic. For one, Valia is extremely friendly, supportive, and encouraging. She paces the assignments and exams so that students are not overwhelmed, and she is frequently available in office hours and after class. In addition, she is a clear and organized lecturer, so the course material is completely understandable and approachable. The homework assignments were a little long at times, but the exercises were mostly engaging extensions of the in-class material, not tedious verifications and calculations; as a result, I enjoyed completing most of the assignments. Some of them were reasonably difficult, but Valia offered helpful advice, so they never felt too overwhelming. The homework assignments also included optional exercises that touched on additional material, which was a nice addition. The exams were pretty similar to the homework assignments in terms of difficulty, but Valia gave us a full day to complete them (in my opinion, this take-home format works very well for high-level math classes).

For those who know something about linear algebra, we covered the following topics: vector spaces and subspaces; span, linear independence, and bases; linear transformations and matrices; determinants; eigenvalues, eigenvectors, and diagonalization; invariant subspaces and the Cayley-Hamilton theorem; and Jordan canonical form. We did not, however, discuss inner product spaces. We also touched on direct sums and quotient spaces, although the latter came only from optional homework exercises, so quotient spaces never appeared on exams. The textbook for the course was Friedberg's "Linear Algebra," which is extremely readable and comprehensive, although a tad bit dry at times.

I highly recommend taking this course with Valia if you have the chance. If you have engaged and supportive classmates (and an active GroupMe chat), the experience is wonderful across the board.