Professor Wake is awful. He is the most awkward man I've ever encountered and it shows in lecture. He doesn't articulate his thoughts well at all and often gets confused while doing a problem on the board. He is very soft spoken and hard to understand. Lecture became useless and I basically had to teach myself the class. Also, his 2 midterms and final were all computational multiple choice questions, which might actually be the worst method possible to gauge a students understanding of high level calculus. You can miss 3 questions (30%) on a test due to arithmetic errors even though you solved the differential equation correctly. Overall, avoid professor Wake at all cost, of the 6 math professors I've had at UCLA he is by far the worst.

Very rude professor who had the most USELESS lectures. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS THIS PROFESSOR DOES NOT KNOW WHAT HE'S DOING...

If you're halfway decent at math, this class isn't really that bad. It's the fact that Dr. Wake gives multiple choice exams with no partial credit that is ridiculous.

I think Professor Wake was pretty average. He lectures just like every other professor in the sense that he explains the concept and then does a couple basic examples from the textbook a.k.a not super helpful but okay. I believe his lectures were clear even though he tends to mumble. I did go over the textbook before every lecture so that probably affected my understanding. The tests were multiple choice and had problems that were VERY similar to the practice problems he assigned weekly. He also only assigned odd numbered problems for homework so that was cool cause you could check the answers in the back of the book. Basically if you read the book and do a whole bunch of practice problems you're set.

Generally I agree with what others said so far. I do think though that people might be a bit too harsh on Wake. Yes, his lectures are kind of a mess, and yes, the lack of partial credit on the exams might be annoying. Yet I still found following his lectures just fine. And the exams all seemed easy and straightforward, except maybe for one question on the final that did require some... creative thinking. Maybe I'm just good enough with numbers to not lose points on computational errors, so that made it easier for me. I still think professor Wake is fine and if you end up with him, it's not the end of the world for you.

Yes, his class is not that awful, IF, you are that interested in math. For people who are fed up with long proof like me, I just had to teach myself.
Not only is his class boring and messy, he also does not really care about teaching. His exams are perfunctory with no materials given. His TA is LAZY and solves TWO equations every 50 MINUTES. His grades come 2 WEEKS after the exam (seems like after the deadline of changing score?).
So alright, he's acceptable, but I would not take his class again.

Professor Wake is a great lecturer. He gives you all of the information you need without going far off topic and without oversimplifying the material. As long as your are actually paying attention to the lectures, you should be fine. The quizzes are from the practice problems which are very easy to neglect and fall behind on, but if you stay on top of them, they should be very easy. The second midterm and final exam were challenging, but one midterm can be dropped so you only need to do well on one of them. He was very responsive to his emails and very helpful in office hours. He seemed to know the answer to the problems off of the top of his head which meant he was fairly dedicated. Overall, a great professor.

If you are not a mathematics major, taking 31B with Wake is a terrible decision. He teaches the class in an extremely conceptual manner, making it very hard to actually apply what you learn in lecture to the tests and quizzes. Though the curves are generous, the averages are quite low (60% range), practically making it impossible to succeed without one. The lack of graded homework is disappointing, as that usually provides a nice cushion on your grade. In Wake's 31B, there are weekly quizzes in discussion worth 10% of your total grade (each quiz worth 1%). This just adds difficulty, as depending on your TA, you will not receive that nice grade cushion. Wake himself is extremely soft-spoken and somewhat awkward, speaking in a quiet voice that is often difficult to understand. He will ask questions about how to proceed even when we haven't even touched on the material in question, leaving awkward 15 second gaps until some brave soul ventures a guess at the answer he is looking for. Overall, Wake is a nice guy but should stick to teaching higher level math, as us non-Math majors are set up to fail in his class.

I took this course in the Winter of 2016, and received an A in the class. First of all, Professor Wake is a fairly new professor for this class. Overall, I thought he was a sub-par lecturer. He had a very shaky voice, and wasn't very clear in his lectures. His hand-writing is fairly legible, but his lectures were incredibly useless in my opinion. Now, I really enjoy math, so like I stated in my review for Popa in Fall 2015 for Math 31A, I thought the course material was really interesting. However, don't expect to learn much during lecture; I learned everything out of the book. In terms of the course, it wasn't very difficult. There were two midterms and a final. All three tests were multiple choice and true/false formatted. The true/false were conceptual topics, and are meant to trick you, so make sure you understand the concepts really well. The multiple choice portion is the big chunk of the test, and is the math part (i.e. answering math questions (e.g. integrals, derivatives etc)). The averages on the tests were relatively low (like most math courses), but I was able to score highly on all three. My recommendation to those who take the class with Professor Wake is to read directly out of the book, and do a lot of the problems out of the book for each section. To be honest, I went to about five lectures all quarter, and did just fine.

Wake is a terrible lecturer. I went to every lecture and rarely understood what he was talking about. He went over a lot of proofs that were not relevant to solving the problems.

The tests are multiple choice, with no partial credit. Very similar to the homework, but still difficult.

Discussion is mandatory, with weekly quizzes of one problem from the optional homework (but really- do the homework and memorize the problems and you'll be set.)

Would not recommend.