MATH 135
Ordinary Differential Equations
Description: Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour. Requisites: courses 33A, 33B. Selected topics in differential equations. Laplace transforms, existence and uniqueness theorems, Fourier series, separation of variable solutions to partial differential equations, Sturm/Liouville theory, calculus of variations, two-point boundary value problems, Green's functions. P/NP or letter grading.
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2024 - Highlights: Super fun guy! He's sweet and occasionally funny. Lectures are pretty good and he has office hours that are somewhat helpful. Homework is definitely long and took 3-4 hours on average but overall pretty manageable if you have the time. Lowlights: Genuinely I have no words for how difficult and out of the ordinary the final was. The content up to the first midterm and the midterm itself was exceptionally easy, we averaged around a 90. The content after the first midterm gets harder VERY quickly and the second midterm had average scores of around a C. Keeping in mind that if you didn't do great on either of the midterms the final has a 55% weightage on your grade, that final was ABSOLUTELY brutal. The difficulty of both midterms were pretty okay and it felt like the material got harder but was still manageable, especially as after the first midterm it does kind of theoretical and proof based. The weeks after the midterm, especially week 10 were a shitshow. The material is EXPONENTIALLY harder than the weeks before and was so exceptionally rushed that, despite the very very very difficult nature of the material, you have less time to learn it. The final itself was...no words. He had stressed that the final would weight post midterm 2 material heavier but the already hard questions were made so hard that there was no possible way you could wrap your head around them. The supposed to be easy questions were changed up so badly that even the easiest 1-part question took me almost 15 minutes to figure out. It was SO much harder than the homework, midterms, and even the practice final. Genuinely, there is no way to prepare for the level of that final, coming from someone who only had one actual final this quarter and spend all of their time studying for this. If you make it past midterm 2 and are not doing great, please just drop the class and save yourself the pain. The entire class left that final saying that it was the worst final they've ever taken and I agree (coming from a CS and applied math major mind you). Overall, if anyone ever says that this class is an easy upper div, please don't listen to them! I personally would not take this class again, but hopefully the curve is good enough to pull through.
Fall 2024 - Highlights: Super fun guy! He's sweet and occasionally funny. Lectures are pretty good and he has office hours that are somewhat helpful. Homework is definitely long and took 3-4 hours on average but overall pretty manageable if you have the time. Lowlights: Genuinely I have no words for how difficult and out of the ordinary the final was. The content up to the first midterm and the midterm itself was exceptionally easy, we averaged around a 90. The content after the first midterm gets harder VERY quickly and the second midterm had average scores of around a C. Keeping in mind that if you didn't do great on either of the midterms the final has a 55% weightage on your grade, that final was ABSOLUTELY brutal. The difficulty of both midterms were pretty okay and it felt like the material got harder but was still manageable, especially as after the first midterm it does kind of theoretical and proof based. The weeks after the midterm, especially week 10 were a shitshow. The material is EXPONENTIALLY harder than the weeks before and was so exceptionally rushed that, despite the very very very difficult nature of the material, you have less time to learn it. The final itself was...no words. He had stressed that the final would weight post midterm 2 material heavier but the already hard questions were made so hard that there was no possible way you could wrap your head around them. The supposed to be easy questions were changed up so badly that even the easiest 1-part question took me almost 15 minutes to figure out. It was SO much harder than the homework, midterms, and even the practice final. Genuinely, there is no way to prepare for the level of that final, coming from someone who only had one actual final this quarter and spend all of their time studying for this. If you make it past midterm 2 and are not doing great, please just drop the class and save yourself the pain. The entire class left that final saying that it was the worst final they've ever taken and I agree (coming from a CS and applied math major mind you). Overall, if anyone ever says that this class is an easy upper div, please don't listen to them! I personally would not take this class again, but hopefully the curve is good enough to pull through.
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2021 - Welcome to Math 135! You probably are here because you heard that 135 is one of the "easier" math classes. Let me just say, Benjamin was like "hold my beer", because this is actually one of the hardest classes I took. Benjamin is a very clear lecturer. We have a Slack page for our class where we can ask questions, and Professor always goes out of his way to answer every question because he cares about us. He does use slides to lecture, but he doesn't just read from them. There are lots of examples and proofs that he works out with us. The grading scheme is as follows: 29.5% Homework, 0.5% End of the term evaluation, 20% Midterm 1, 20% Midterm 2, 30% Final Exam >70% guarantees at least a C-, >80% guarantees at least a B- and so on. The first few weeks of 135 was very straightfoward. All the content up to midterm 1 was simple. But once we started learning about existence and uniqueness, this class felt more like an analysis class than a differential equations class. Half of the class, we were learning proofs and half of the time we were doing computational work. His homework is pretty challenging and long, so be sure to start early. Homework is due every Wednesday. Each assignment is about half proofs and half computations. The proof questions were very difficult and the computational problems were long but mostly straightforward. Some of these computational problems are very lengthy and you may have to use lots of pages to solve them! Only about 30% of the homework was graded for correctness, and the rest is graded for completeness. There were 2 midterms for this class. Midterms 1 and 2 were challenging but still had averages in the mid 80s. However the final exam almost made me cry (average was still somehow a 47/60, how??). To put this into context, if you ever played Pokemon, imagine that Midterm 1 is gym leader Whitney, Midterm 2 is Champion Lance, and the Final Exam is Champion Cynthia from Pokemon Platinum. Because that's how hard they were. To conclude this, Benjamin cares a lot about his students. His Bitmojis make me smile. His lectures are engaging and I would definitely take another class with him again! I highly recommend him if you want to challenge yourself. You will learn a lot from his class! Edit: Forgot to mention that I appreciate him giving us 40 hours for the midterms and for curving my 81.8% to a B.
Winter 2021 - Welcome to Math 135! You probably are here because you heard that 135 is one of the "easier" math classes. Let me just say, Benjamin was like "hold my beer", because this is actually one of the hardest classes I took. Benjamin is a very clear lecturer. We have a Slack page for our class where we can ask questions, and Professor always goes out of his way to answer every question because he cares about us. He does use slides to lecture, but he doesn't just read from them. There are lots of examples and proofs that he works out with us. The grading scheme is as follows: 29.5% Homework, 0.5% End of the term evaluation, 20% Midterm 1, 20% Midterm 2, 30% Final Exam >70% guarantees at least a C-, >80% guarantees at least a B- and so on. The first few weeks of 135 was very straightfoward. All the content up to midterm 1 was simple. But once we started learning about existence and uniqueness, this class felt more like an analysis class than a differential equations class. Half of the class, we were learning proofs and half of the time we were doing computational work. His homework is pretty challenging and long, so be sure to start early. Homework is due every Wednesday. Each assignment is about half proofs and half computations. The proof questions were very difficult and the computational problems were long but mostly straightforward. Some of these computational problems are very lengthy and you may have to use lots of pages to solve them! Only about 30% of the homework was graded for correctness, and the rest is graded for completeness. There were 2 midterms for this class. Midterms 1 and 2 were challenging but still had averages in the mid 80s. However the final exam almost made me cry (average was still somehow a 47/60, how??). To put this into context, if you ever played Pokemon, imagine that Midterm 1 is gym leader Whitney, Midterm 2 is Champion Lance, and the Final Exam is Champion Cynthia from Pokemon Platinum. Because that's how hard they were. To conclude this, Benjamin cares a lot about his students. His Bitmojis make me smile. His lectures are engaging and I would definitely take another class with him again! I highly recommend him if you want to challenge yourself. You will learn a lot from his class! Edit: Forgot to mention that I appreciate him giving us 40 hours for the midterms and for curving my 81.8% to a B.
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2023 - This class was a lot more difficult than I originally anticipated, and I believe that the class felt the same way considering the lower averages for the two midterms. The professor made sure to answer any and all questions, but in doing so he would fail to finish his planned lecture. Towards the end of the quarter, it became almost required to attend the office hours to finish the rest of the lecture. While the homework itself wasn't too long, it didn't give a good idea of how the exams would go. There needed to be more practice questions that followed the same format as the exam. I had to reread a lot of the questions to understand what was being asked of me. Some exam questions were freebies as long as you included the right definitions and theorems on the cheat sheet. That was the main use of the cheat sheet since most of it came down to applying what was covered in lecture and homework assignments.
Fall 2023 - This class was a lot more difficult than I originally anticipated, and I believe that the class felt the same way considering the lower averages for the two midterms. The professor made sure to answer any and all questions, but in doing so he would fail to finish his planned lecture. Towards the end of the quarter, it became almost required to attend the office hours to finish the rest of the lecture. While the homework itself wasn't too long, it didn't give a good idea of how the exams would go. There needed to be more practice questions that followed the same format as the exam. I had to reread a lot of the questions to understand what was being asked of me. Some exam questions were freebies as long as you included the right definitions and theorems on the cheat sheet. That was the main use of the cheat sheet since most of it came down to applying what was covered in lecture and homework assignments.
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