I took Dr. Burgin's CS 180 class this summer. It was truthfully a terrific experience and I highly recommend taking it with Burgin. He does a very good job of explaining each proof for every algorithm in detail, and if you don't understand any part of a proof it is very easy to approach him during break or office hours. He will spend as much time as necessary to make sure every student understands each part of every algorithm and its proof.
His homeworks are not too difficult, but I would make sure you do them and understand them well. If you do so, you should be able to get a good grade on the tests.
I would highly recommend being in a class with Burgin, as he explains the material thoughtfully, in depth, and understandably. He makes sure his proofs are mathematically precise and at the same time not too formal so as to not waste time. If you take this class I guarantee that by the end, if you put in the work, you will understand the material remarkably well.

This guy doesn't know how to teach CS 180. Majority of the class stopped attending lectures after 3 or 4 weeks. Everything is a mess.

This is my first time writing a review on bruinwalk. This is the WORST professor and the WORST experience I've I ever had.
If you are not the following people I describe, PLEASE AVOID AT ALL COST!!!!!!
1) loves answering questions ##This professor gives tons of extra credits for answer questions and they are super easy but you have to respond really fast.
2) wants a B or a pass ##hard A, relatively easy B
3) super super super smart ##Even without a professor you can get an A

To be honest, this professor welcomes questions and loves helping students, and he knows his stuff, so basically, you can learn about algorithms from him. However, he is a slow person and this causes a lot of confusions and annoyance.

Alright, here are my reasons why I wish I would have never taken this course. First, this professor talks really really really slow that I would learn much more from a course in the regular quarter. Second, we HAVE TO ASK ABOUT HOMEWORK CLARIFICATION because none of the homework is clearly assigned. None of us understands the problem unless he explains in his office hour. To make it worse, homework is VERY strictly graded. Too strict that when I am correct, the points are deducted, and I had to ask the professor why I was wrong and he asked me to wait. To make it even worse, he graded all the two homework in week 8(one remaining because the third one was submitted during the final week). WEEK EIGHT??????? So basically, you will know nothing about how your exams and homework is going and have no chance to decide whether to drop this course because you will never know them until 24 hours before the final exam.

Graded midterms also have tons of mistakes. There is no explanation of why points are deducted, and almost all the people asked for a re-grade and after going to 2-3 times of office hour we succeed, and most of us get 10-20 points back. Sounds good? NO. These points are actually what we deserve. You will never know if the final exam and the last homework would be fairly graded, plus the final is much harder than the midterm.

If I were you and I had a chance to choose whether to take this course or not, I will not. If you have to take this course, then wish you luck, and don't be so afraid because B is not so hard.

I really enjoyed taking CS 180 with Professor Burgin. His lectures were engaging and he encourages people to ask questions during class. Professor Burgin really emphasizes the theory part while teaching Algorithms. He tries to make sure that people understand exactly how each algorithm work and how to prove that they are correct.

We had five homework assignments which were each due a week after they were assigned. They each covered topics taught in class and Professor Burgin made sure to answer questions to clarify the problems that were assigned. It is important to pay attention to how the material is taught in class and written in the textbook because Professor Burgin wants to see the questions answers using rigorous mathematical notation. There is partial credit for the homework questions as each have multiple parts that need to be answered. It is important to prove the correctness for the algorithms in the homeworks and the exams.

The midterm and final were similar to the homeworks but were only given a day to be completed. They both could be completed within the time provided and were similar to problems in class or in the textbook. Professor Burgin answers clarifications questions by email during the exam. I enjoyed answering the problems as they were all stated as real world scenarios that needed a solution. I recommend reading over your solutions in order to make sure that they are clear to the graders.

Taking algorithms with Professor Burgin was a very interesting class for me as it is taught for a theoretical computer science perspective. He mentions additional mathematical topics beyond the scope of the class such as Kolmogorov Complexity in order to give his students a greater background computational theory. I feel that I learned at lot from Professor Burgin as the topics that he taught were useful for further courses such as CS 181 (Formal Languages and Automata Theory) and CS 161 (Artificial Intelligence). While he did not spend specifically on algorithms for interview prep, the skills that Professor Burgin taught can be applied throughout the field of computer science.

I see there are some polarizing reviews for this class and professor so hopefully I can bridge the gap. Given that this is a class for mostly computer science majors I can see why some feel frustrated about the content. This class is more of a math class than computer science; we learn algorithms (some are important for interviews) but the real focus is on proving that the algorithm works. To me, it was a refreshing break from 8 hour coding projects, but maybe not to others. I want to emphasize that math is the basis of any STEM discipline, so it is important to at least understand the reasoning hiding behind the notation of rigorous proofs.
As for lectures, I took the class online and so it was Zoom lectures with a whiteboard. I do prefer this format to slides for any class with a lot of math. Professor Burgin speaks slowly and methodically; this can be good or bad depending on your learning speed. Either way you can adjust the speed in the recordings so it's not a big deal. I personally think that he did a good job balancing mathematical rigor and practicality and though the notation may be difficult to understand at first, it is consistent.
The homework usually consisted of proving 1 or 2 algorithms. The load and difficulty was fair and the professor is very helpful if you do have questions. Exam questions were very similar in difficulty to the homework. Overall, if you pay attention in lecture and you enjoy more theoretical content this is a great class for you. Otherwise, still pay attention and ask questions as you go.

Lectures: useless.
I stopped going after week 2, because the prof is either incomprehensible or moving at a snails pace. I learned all the material through the completion of the homework, which allowed me to do better than average on the tests. I did so by reading the textbook and using it to reference answers for specific questions in the HW. With this professor, that's the move. With other professors, I'm sure you'd have to actually attend lecture and learn something :shrug:

I took Dr. Burgin's class in an online setting over the summer. Overall I felt that he did a really good job teaching the material. He explains all the algorithms and proofs in detail and doesn't skip any steps or explanations in the symbol usage that many other professors would have deemed trivial, which saved me from many bouts of confusion. Though sometimes the homework/exam questions could be worded ambiguously, he was very patient and approachable and was always willing to help with homework or conceptual clarifications during office hours.

Additionally, Dr. Burgin talks very slowly, which was incredibly helpful in the online setting. It really gave me the time to take notes and comprehend what he was teaching instead of just getting caught in a mad scramble to write down as much as possible. The homework and exams were not overly challenging, but not easy either; you will need to put in the effort to really understand the material. The class topics are critical if you take more computer science courses, so the effort will be worth it, grade notwithstanding.

Dr. Burgin is a very knowledgable professor. He dived very deep to this area and his works are influential and extensively cited. In addition to programming knowldge, he has a rather solid mathematic background, which is exactly what student need in a algorithm class like cs180. For every type of problems we need to learn in this class, Dr. Burgin provides a clear and rigorous definition. For the same reason, the algorithm he teaches is rather comprehensive that can be applied to a wide range of study. If you want have a solid understanding of algorithm design rather than just superficial knowledge, you will gain what you want from this class.

Regarding grading, Dr.Burgin provide students a opportunity to choose whether using +/- scheme. This will help if you get an - score and you will be round up, which actually elevate the chance of getting an A.

The workload is fair. Each week we focus on one type of the problem. And the assgnment is just design an algorithm to solve the problem. For most of the time, the solution has been provided by Dr. Burgin during lecture and all you need to do is to apply the algorithm. So the assgnment will be easy for you if you pay attention to the class.

And the exam is close to homework, but sometimes Dr. Burgin will make some changes to the setup and you will need do some transformation to apply the algorithm you did in homework. Overall, the exam is pretty inspiring and manageable

I had a good experience in Dr. Burgin's class overall. I took his class in Summer, which is a little fast paced (8weeks including final week). However, we were able to finish class materials and have a good sense of what CS180 has to offer.
CS180 is in general not an easy class. It requires a lot of effort, studying and can be a little time consuming if you are not used to proofs. Dr. Burgin makes it easy to understand and gives fair homework each week giving you plenty of time to work on them.
Homework/ Midterm questions can sometimes be ambiguous but Dr. Burgin has his door open for questions and clarifications and is willing to help students.
Overall, Dr. Burgin is a very nice person, helpful, approachable and wants his students to succeed.

It has been two years since I took this course with professor Burgin but I still remember how I felt about the course. I'm almost graduating from school and I can say that this class is one of my favorite classes I took at UCLA. Here are some of the reasons I liked this course:

1) Professor Burgin encourages students to participate in class by giving extra credits to students who answer questions during the lecture. Most of the time, those questions were not difficult or tricky--if you are paying attention, you will be able to answer. This made me preview/review materials more than usual and I ended up studying a lot more.

2) He is very patient with students when they ask questions. He didn't seem to mind spending lots of extra time answering questions and explaining things again and again, especially during the break and office hours. I went to ask questions many times during office hour and he was always extremely nice and kind. He genuinely cares about students. Not many professors are willing to spend hours after class discussing lecture materials but he is. I always felt welcome whenever I went to ask questions to him.

3) He allows us to bring our note to exams as long as it's handwritten by you. He said that he believes people learn things when they are writing it down. He even said he wouldn't mind if a student rewrites the entire textbook by hand and bring that to the exam because that student must have learned a lot through the process. I liked this policy because being allowed to bring a cheatsheet reduced the stress of taking exams. His exams were not that simple though. Even if you have all the lecture notes, you wouldn't be able to answer all the questions on the exam if you don't understand the concept well. The difficulty of the exams was fair, especially because we could reference our notes during the exams.

It goes without mentioning that he is very knowledgable and intelligent. I am so glad I took this course with him. One last thing: I did not confirm this with the professor, but I think he gives students lots of partial credits on the exam if you show your work. I felt like he values how you approach the problems to which you don't know the perfect answer. So, on exams, even if you don't know a complete answer, you can still get a pretty good score as long as you show your work and explain why you think a certain algorithm would work along with the potential flaws of it. I really recommend you to take this course with professor Burgin. He is not an easy-A professor, but you will learn a lot from him!