Great professor. Gives very clear demonstration. Definitely recommended.

Alexey speaks with a very strong European accent but nevertheless he speaks slowly so that students can understand what he is saying. He likes to use the phrase "in fact" a lot during his lectures but it is very funny because his accent makes it sound like he is using the F word all the way. Anyway, Alexey is very helpful, though I think it would help if he structured his lessons better. There were some lessons in the middle of the quarter, especially when it came to the part about convergence in probability where most of the class were confused because the lectures couldn't keep up with the understanding required from the homework that was set. However, Alexey gave us many homework time extensions because of this and was very understanding about submitting homework. He was also very helpful during office hours when I went to ask him about various homework questions every week (I had many questions because his homework was pretty difficult and needed a lot of applying concepts to new situations not seen during the lecture).

Alexei only wears maybe 2 shirts the entire quarter, or perhaps he has multiple of these 2 shirts with the same 2 designs. In particular, he has a green and blue shirt of the same design and you will probably see him like that alternating between shirts every lecture. They say that geniuses always wear the same shirt so Alexei must be a genius.

While Alexey's homeworks are very hard, his midterms and final are also hard but definitely no harder than the homeworks (since the homeworks are already very hard). In this manner, if you can understand exactly how to do each homework question and the concepts behind them, then you will have no problems for his exams. Make good use of his office hours and the TA's office hours to ask about homework questions because he tends to set questions very close to that of the homeworks and problems that he has gone through in class!

Overall, Alexey gives off the impression that he is a big, warm teddy bear that can look quite intimidating at first, but can be quite funny when you talk to him.