People always say that Math 131A is the hardest undergraduate math class, but Professor Eskin made the content much easier. He taught from the memory and made almost no mistakes. For all the convoluted theorems, he was able to point out all the hard points in the derivation and repeat until everyone understood. He was also helpful in his office hours to explain the HW problems and repeat the proofs as many times as you want.

His exams were not difficult. More than half of the problems were exact proofs from the lectures (thought there were about 20 proofs for the midterm and more than 40 for the final). The rest were some kind of modifications. However, I barely gained partial credits. I did the first part of a proof correctly and the second part incorrectly and only got 10/25 for that problem.

In the end, it doesn’t seem like he give a generous curve, at lease for the quarter I had. From the distribution given by my TA, 1 student got more than 90%, 2 more than 80%, and 3 more than 70%. All these people got A, and the others received B or less, no A- or B+ given.

It is imperative that you get a good seat in the front of the class because it would be easier to hear a butterfly sneeze than him lecturing. Like others have said, he will do homework problems for you in his office hours. He makes few mistakes but for the most part he does a very good job teaching the material. He curves pretty generously but be warned, you are still taking one of the hardest (if not the hardest) undergraduate math classes at UCLA so do not expect to get a good grade without putting in a lot of work. My TA was William Feldman and he was a very harsh grader; hope you don't get a harsh grader. Looking back on the midterm, it really wasn't that difficult, still the mean and median were very low. Do not screw up the final or 85% of your grade will ride on the Final!

I thought Eskin was great. He's a pretty slow, clear lecturer, his homework assignments are reasonably long and his tests are very fair. For his exams, understand the theorems in the chapters. He likes to put proofs on the exams(as if that's a surprise). Understand the homework problems and understand the theories that you find in the book and in lecture and you'll be fine.