MATH 3100

Dimou is often a funny guy (sometimes unintentionally????), and he is consistent about having office hours and being willing to meet/stay late after OH to help students. This class will be very useful for stat/math/ML people until about 3/5s of the way through. Afterwards, the content turns into a very very dry exploration of some higher/less applicable prob ideas. The Central Limit Theorem (probably the coolest thing in probability) is only mentioned in one sentence in class notes.

Oh man, the lectures are incredibly slow and boring. When doing examples in class, Dimou solves the ENTIRE problem, not just the part where we need to apply some prob concept. This results in about 60% of the lectures being Dimou working on simplifying highschool algebra problems or Dimou solving double integrals. This made lectures painstakingly slow. Homeworks are pretty difficult, but not impossible. They usually go beyond class material in some critical ways, which meant I wasn't able to solve some of them without seeing some "trick" we never covered in class... Exams are really easy if you do the practice problems he sends out before each exam. I was looking forward to taking prob, but I felt around half of this class was not very important, applicable, or interesting.

I had some trouble with this class since I took it as a first year in the fall, but it's not so hard in hindsight, although it has some unforgiving grading schemes. The lectures are very very dry, and there's really no point in taking notes tbh since everything is posted online. The professor himself is generally pretty understandable and thorough and the tests are pretty fair(just do the review set unlike me). However, one thing I didn't really like was how much of the problems we do in class and for homework would include some unnecessarily convoluted integral or algebra that really had nothing to do with probability. Some of the probability concepts felt kind of useless or overly conceptual too, especially towards the end.