MATH 2310

This course is tough. It is all about visualizing 3-D spaces, which I am not particularly good at.
There were 10 homeworks (about 1 per week with around 15 problems each), 3 pop quizzes during the discussion section (that really don't hurt your grade), and 3 midterms. This class is a fair amount of work and self-teaching. Do NOT get behind and make sure you understand the early topics really well because they will come back to haunt you at the end.
That being said, Prof. Petrov makes this class bearable and he is very helpful when you need it. He will literally respond to messages within seconds. He's a great guy and really understands the math so I would HIGHLY recommend taking Calculus III with him if he teaches it again.

Like with any math class, you're going to have to learn a lot of the material on your own. Initially, I was turned off by Petrov's teaching style, but grew to find him funny and knowledgeable. Midterms were graded generously, the final was a bit tougher than the midterms, but he curved it. Overall, I recommend Petrov, just be willing to do the work.

Prof. Petrov's lecture sometimes becomes fast, but he does explain everything necessary to succeeding in this course. Office hour is helpful. Midterms are not hard, while the final is a little bit but fair. Overall it is not an easy course, but you will definitely learn a great deal if you understand every point in lecture and assignment.

Before Final, I thought I was the master of Cal 3.
I failed my final and missed two homework.
I ended up with an A-.

I love Prof. Petrov... as a professor of course. He teaches incredible if you have already learned Calculus 3 before and teaches ok if you have not learned Calculus 3 before. His explainations and proofs for concepts are intuitive most of the time (although if asked to explain what he proofed after class you would likely be saying I am not sure). He does not explain the concepts like most teachers. For example, for curl and divergence, he explained the concepts using mathematical topography (I forgot what it was called), so instead of showing us the geometric/physical meaning of those concepts, he derived it mathematically. That is kind of cool (but also not helpful for learning it). It would be extremely useful to preview the materials beforehand and perhaps follow Khan Academy in learning the stuff first. Then, you would his Prof. Petrov's lecture a lot more rewarding and interesting.

His lectures are hard to follow for another reason — he raps a lot. What I mean is that he writes and calculates really, really fast in live time as he does not prepare lecture slides. The lack of lecture slides also means a lack of truly visualizing many of the 3D surfaces, so I really recommend seeing some Khan Academy videos early on to get a sense of the 3D objects that you will be dealing with. It is very satisfying to see his hand glide across the board like a figure skater, although you may not follow his calculations half the time. Moreover, he asks students to ask questions a lot of the time, but most of the time we cannot process what he taught us: he ends up thinking maybe that we understand the concept perfectly when in reality do not understand anything so we cannot ask anything.

Being in the A-School, I took Calculus 3 mostly for fun because I honestly found AP Calc BC incredible. Prof. Petrov's tests are incredibly fair because he almost only tests question types that you have definitely encountered before if you have done all the homework. Also, he has one-question quizzes in most weeks, and they are usually very basic, just a way to check for understand. In the two midterms, a very large proportion of people got 100. I always make small mistakes, so he graded harsher for any smaller mistakes made since too many people got full marks. I only went to his office hour once — and that is two hours before the final. He is relatively patient in explaining concepts; his temper will never grow foul, but his speed of explaination is usually really fast, like his lectures.

The biggest weakness in this class is when you get to the hard stuff at the end of the semester: line and surface integrals. In fact, those are the things Prof. Petrov uses the most in his research, but perhaps because of this fact, he teaches these concepts the worst. His thinking of these concepts are too advanced for students. In those lectures for especially Stoke's Theorem and Surface Integrals, he glosses over the concepts pretty fast despite them being very confusing. I got 6/10 for the Stoke's Theorem quiz but eventually understood the concept before the final. All-in-all, I did enjoy calc 3 with Prof. Petrov. He probably won't teach this class anytime soon, but here is my recommendation for the class.