Professor
Jason Devita
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Most Helpful Review
I highly recommend Professor DeVita! He is a pretty young guy, especially compared to others in the math dept, so he can relate to undergrads. Upper-divs can be a great or horrible experience, depending on the professor. With DeVita you will get effective lectures that go by the book, concise homework, and very fair exams (open book/notes!!). I was in 151A the term before with Fattorhini, so I can directly compare their teaching styles. Even though Fattorhini was very friendly and wanted us to learn, it was clear that he cared more about theory than the application or large-scale computing. Even though it was supposed to be numerical ANALYSIS, that professor focused on proofs and barely touched coding. The difference with DeVita was night-and-day; he approached the same topics with a focus on application and encouraged use of programs like Matlab. The pace was great for an intro class.. he started with the basics of using a programming language and familiar processes like bisection method. Lectures were very clear and involved both derivations and examples.. no sweat if you missed lecture, because it was clear which section in the book to read. My favorite thing about Professor DeVita was his awareness of industry application. A lot of math professors forget that most undergrads are more interested in industry than academia. Professor DeVita spent just as much time discussing effective coding (minimizing computational error, using binary, etc) as he did on theorem proofs. I look forward to taking 151B with him next quarter :)
I highly recommend Professor DeVita! He is a pretty young guy, especially compared to others in the math dept, so he can relate to undergrads. Upper-divs can be a great or horrible experience, depending on the professor. With DeVita you will get effective lectures that go by the book, concise homework, and very fair exams (open book/notes!!). I was in 151A the term before with Fattorhini, so I can directly compare their teaching styles. Even though Fattorhini was very friendly and wanted us to learn, it was clear that he cared more about theory than the application or large-scale computing. Even though it was supposed to be numerical ANALYSIS, that professor focused on proofs and barely touched coding. The difference with DeVita was night-and-day; he approached the same topics with a focus on application and encouraged use of programs like Matlab. The pace was great for an intro class.. he started with the basics of using a programming language and familiar processes like bisection method. Lectures were very clear and involved both derivations and examples.. no sweat if you missed lecture, because it was clear which section in the book to read. My favorite thing about Professor DeVita was his awareness of industry application. A lot of math professors forget that most undergrads are more interested in industry than academia. Professor DeVita spent just as much time discussing effective coding (minimizing computational error, using binary, etc) as he did on theorem proofs. I look forward to taking 151B with him next quarter :)
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