MATH 3250

Ira is a very knowledgable professor on the topic of Differential Equations, but his lectures typically consist of him working through a couple of problems he finds important. His lectures do not flow very well and reading the WebAssign carefully is absolutely essential to understanding the material. Each week he gives one written problem set and one WebAssign followed by quizzes in the discussion and classwork once a week. Protip: complete the WebAssigns in advance to get extra credit. This course goes over more existence and uniqueness Theorems than the APMA course so unless required I would recommend taking the APMA course.

I really struggled with this course- I found calculus classes here very enjoyable, but this class was so horrible for me. Ira is quite boring (and his handwriting is very very hard to read), and he doesn't explain the underlying ideas behind what he is teaching, making it very hard to truly understand what is going on. Also, if you haven't taken linear algebra, the second half of the class is completely built off of linear algebra concepts and it makes the class so much harder if you don't have a background with linear algebra.

ATTENTION: do not take this class with Professor Herbst. He is awful and you WILL regret it. If you are not majoring in Math, take APMA 2130, the ODE class offered by the School of Engineering as it most likely counts for your degree in place of Math 3250/3255. Overall, far better reviews from students and you will actually learn something. The APMA class is also offered in Summer. You have been warned.

This class was very boring and I usually find math exciting. Ira taught by just writing examples on the board (which were usually all in the book) and then offering little explanation about how/why the formulas and math worked. The homeworks often took upwards of 10 hours a week and that was while working in a group with the majority of the class. They were also graded unnecessarily harshly, albeit this being the grader's fault and not Prof. Herbst's. The one thing I will say about Herbst is that the exams were very fair. He scares you at the beginning of the year by telling you he doesn't curve (which he doesn't as far as I'm aware). But he makes up for it by making the exams manageable. We were all very worried heading into the first exam but I know the large majority of us did well and 3 (out of 17) got 100s. The second exam was harder with an average of around 80 and the final was decent. I think he may have curved the final slightly. Overall, Ira is a pretty bad teacher but not a bad guy.