MATH 3100

Honestly bless Professor Sy's soul. I know he found a job in London, but I still feel the need to write this because of the fact that he saved my ass. He curves every exam ridiculously hard (by this I mean that when I went to go check my answers for the second midterm, about half of them were wrong and I still got a 97 on the exam) so that everyone can do well enough, and there's only ever one challenging problem on the test. Literally everything else was stuff we covered in class, which made it really easy to do because this semester's exams were open note. I know I did just say that I got like half of the questions on the exam wrong, but part of that is because I'm very very bad at calculus; almost all of those mistakes were basic arithmetic problems. In terms of his teaching, he basically does what's in the textbook. I didn't actually read the textbook, but when I went to go to the problem sets that he assigned, I noticed that pretty much every example he gives in the class comes straight out of the textbook examples and the same with the proofs. He goes on a couple of philosophical tangents about universality, probabilistic vs. deterministic truths, intuition vs. rigorous proofs, and I won't lie, it made it want to become a scholar in probability theory and its implications for the philosophy of math. He's also relatively accommodating for assignments and their deadlines. There were times when he would give us two or three extensions on a homework assignment because we were all just so overwhelmed or we had an exam for the class very close to the homework due date. At the beginning of the semester, he had also intended to give us pop quizzes, but when he found out that a very large portion of the class was international students 12 hours away, he decided not to. The grading distribution was 10% quizzes (he did give us 2 multiple choice, really easy quizzes to do at home just to have something to put in this category), 20% homework (6 problem sets, each about 10-15 pages typed for me when solved), 20% Exam 1, 20% Exam 2, 30% Final.