I remember in a library on campus a couple quarters ago (back when that was legal), and I heard in passing a comment made between friends:

“Imagine having an entire building for teaching math, but no one there can actually teach it.”

And I can understand that feeling. The reputation of a subject that is seen by many as very difficult and tedious and hard to understand (which it indeed is quite often) makes it easy to end up hating on math teachers and professors a lot for making already hard courses a nightmare.

What’s worse is that sometimes teachers are so incredibly smart that they actually have a hard time teaching explaining some concepts at a basic level, especially important for say a class about Real Analysis where many undergraduate students are becoming familiar with its difficult details for the very first time.

But I’m here to say in this review that Professor Eriksson-Bique has completely broken these molds, and I can’t believe I got so lucky to have the opportunity to join his class, even in this online quarter. He has not only demonstrated that he cares about us and our learning, but he has also shown some of the best adaptability to an online environment that I’ve seen so far (Not to mention, he’s pretty funny and easy to talk to/ask questions, but that’s just a nice cherry on top).

One of the key differences immediately apparent that makes this professor stand above the rest I’ve seen so far is that he seems to be the most aware that’s he’s not just writing some notes on a page for us to read; he’s actually aware of the cognitive processes going on, what’s important to highlight, what is an important trick that we’ll see later, overarching ideas that help us as students put the pieces together. In particular, when he writes proofs, one small but really helpful detail is that during the proof writing, he writes off to the side little notes like “1. Choosing delta” or “3. Estimation” so that we get a good sense of how the proof should flow, and highlighting the importance of what needs to be said/invoked before we can move on.

Another great example that helped at least me is that for this part 2 of Real Analysis, we start talking about a general concept of uniformity, both for continuous functions and for sequences of functions. While textbooks and I bet many professors would simply give definitions and go right on to applications and problems, Professor Eriksson-Bique took at least a bit of time to really explore how these ideas differed from previous concepts like regular continuity and pointwise convergence. In particular, he highlighted the importance of the order of the quantifiers, and took some time to explore how this key difference could change the answer to certain questions you could ask about certain sequences or functions.

As for office hours, I have mostly positive feelings. Especially in an online quarter where it was harder to connect with everyone face to face, I believe that Professor Eriksson-Bique made a great decision to make some practice problems to discuss in groups, added a much needed element of being able to bounce ideas off of each other and even have a bit of fun sometimes. The more important piece of feedback I have for these though is that sometimes, he would assign a problem that was a bit too hard to think about on the spot there. He gave good room to throw out ideas, but at the end of the day, he was just showing us a solution (which we often did not entirely understand in the moment), which is not really what office hours were supposed to be about. In fact, I think I would suggest that instead of just asking for “any homework questions” (which in my experience, being asked that out of the blue doesn’t really elicit many responses, even if people have some), he could make a more clear split between office hours that were devoted to homework help/actual questions and purposefully not have as much discussion of new problems in those hours, and these discussion office hours. The problem boils down to the fact that sometimes, these proofs or problems take time to digest, more than can be done often in a discussion style office hour, so having this split could give time to come more prepared with homework/general questions.

Finally, I think no review would be complete without mentioning this: I know there is a strong stereotype especially nowadays of math professors being a bunch of old dudes stuck in their own heads, unaccommodating, dismissive, and unsympathetic of students who are concerned with the state of our country and are in truly tough spots. However, Professor Eriksson-Bique once again breaks this mold by showing true compassion for us as the students who have to learn in this condition. Quoting a post he made to Campuswire:
“Many of us, myself included, are minorities of various types, and may face fear for their safety. Even those of us who are not, can sympathize and know that the constant threats of violence and injustices serve only to limit us all. The healing is all of our responsibility, and each of us can think how their position allows for improving diversity, fairness and equality. I myself am committed to these in the courses that I teach, and am deeply mindful how there are still many impediments in our colleges to diversity and roadblocks to access.”

How many math professors say things like this unprompted, and not just something like “oh, well, sucks for you guys. Finals as planned.” in response to requests for accommodation? What a guy! I really respect Sylvester as a person.

I don’t really say this kind of thing too often, but I am really thankful for Professor Eriksson-Bique for making Real Analysis fun for the first time for me! Please do take a class with him if you get the opportunity to.

(Ok, well Professor has just said he will not be returning to UCLA, so I suppose much of this might not be useful, but no use deleting my thoughts. Maybe I’ll leave this just as a shining example that good math teachers do exist!)

I just wanted to start out by saying that Sylvester, the god himself, is by far one of the best mathematics professors at UCLA. Despite being a new professor, he handled teaching Math 32A very well, and I'd highly recommend that if he's available, go ahead and take his section!
His lectures are okay, and he connects the topics well. Sometimes he might not explain a concept the best, but if you ask questions he takes care to answer them all during lecture with extreme clarity, which is definitely a big bonus. He does have typos (on both online documents and during lecture), but honestly those do not detract from the material that he's teaching.
During discussion, people would do groupwork (assisted by LAs) worksheets that quite closely resembled the exam questions, and since discussion is part of the participation grade, I'd highly recommend going.
The midterms are straight up easy, but can be time consuming. As long as you paid attention during lecture and worked somewhat on the worksheet/homework problems, you were guaranteed As on the midterms. The final is somewhat a lot more difficult (during final exam review he even stumped himself while trying to solve a question...), but he accommodates by grading extremely leniently (he told us no long computations would be on the test, and when there was a question that was extremely tedious, I believe he ended up giving a lot of people full marks to compensate). His grading scheme is pretty fair; your standard 10-25-25-40 I believe, and he DOES give extra credit, so make sure to utilize those as much as possible (we got 1% for analyzing a map of UCLA and 3% for Piazza participation). Overall, awesome dude. Follow his Instragram too!

For being a newer professor, Sylvester is a great one and really knows his stuff. However, this class became very difficult very fast. Learning multivariable calculus can be a novel experience for most, but Sylvester does his best to make it as palatable and straightforward as possible. In lecture, his steps and processes are very linear and easy to comprehend, but his homework was HARD. The homework requires that you take what you learned in lecture and apply it, but I was in office hours almost every week trying to make sense of what we were expected to find in the problems; there was one question (I think it was from week 9) that I had two engineering tutors try to help me with, and neither of them could figure it out! Also, his online "quizzes" are really more like online tests because they were too long for me to complete in a reasonable amount of time.

The midterms were interesting; the first one was pretty easy (I got an 84% and the average was about 90%), and I guess Sylvester assumed that we weren't being challenged enough, so he made the next midterm harder. Lo and behold I got a whopping 40%, whereas the average was still somewhere about 80%, so imagine my reaction when he decided to make the final harder still. The final went decently enough for me to do okay in the class, but some questions were still pretty difficult, and I scored below the average yet again. My saving grace from all this was Piazza, an online service we used to share practice and challenge questions. He gives up to 3% extra credit for participation on Piazza, so I took advantage of that like there was no tomorrow. He also gives 1% extra credit for being able to describe a map and several of its features (maxima, minima, saddle points etc.).

His grading scale allows one of the midterms to be dropped, which ended up keeping me in the B range. Overall, I learned a lot from this class, but I felt the difficulty was way more intense than it needed to be.

Sylvester is a great prof! He explains concepts clearly, does examples, and is a genuinely nice person. The material itself can be hard at times, especially with conceptual ideas being necessary for the T/F section of the exam, but Sylvester taught it well.

The first midterm for the class was straightforward and easy. Since the average for the first midterm was pretty high, and since the later material was more complex, the second midterm exam was harder, but still fair. The final, on the other hand, was really hard, but was graded generously. Sylvester also offers extra credit for participation on Piazza (which was a really good resource)!

10/10 would recommend

Sylvester hosted a lot of office hours each week, which really helped as sometimes his lectures would go by really fast. Office hours were extremely clarifying and the class had very knowledgable LAs. The homeworks were often difficult but manageable if you showed up to office hours. I liked how he tested more on concepts than algebra given that this was a calculus class.

TL;DR: Very nice guy, very nice teaching, extra credits given, easy As. Highly recommended.

Prof. Eriksson-Bique is one of the nicest guys in the math department. He gives review session before every exam and several extra credits which are very easy to get. If you attend and understand all his lectures you are not far from an A. The midterms for us couldn't be easier, but the final was harder.
He would have LAs, but definitely don't trust them. He also uses Piazza, where you can post problems and your peers and prof. himself will reply to that. You can also find him in his OHs; he had OHs Tuesday through Thursday, extraordinarily more frequent than average profs.

I love Sylvester he's not only good at teaching he's also a very nice person and cares about student learning. This is the first math class I took at UCLA and he would hold review sessions before each midterms and final, and I only recently found out not all math professors do that rip. His Friday classes are usually very chill, and he bakes cookies for students (that's so wholesome). He also follows students back on Instagram and friends you on facebook ! What a nice wholesome professor.
The only thing that is a bit annoying are the online quizzes and I had a somewhat racist TA, but other than that everything about him is so good. If you have studied a bit more you would definitely get an A+.

Sylvester is really nice! Lectures can be confusing and messy sometimes but learning from the book is very manageable. His midterms I'd say were fair; he has T/F sections so you can't brush off conceptually understanding what everything is. The final was insanely hard but he understood it was hard so he graded it very leniently so that was nice of him... and he offered extra credit!! I liked this class!

Sylvester is an awesome prof! He answers questions very promptly on Piazza, offers a good amount of extra credit (be active online) and is a genuinely nice guy to talk to. He makes an effort to address every student by their name (and did a very good job) and always corrects any mistakes he made during lecture with a follow-up online. Lecture is sometimes too short for me to digest the material, but attending his office hours helped a lot. Definitely recommend taking his class!

A very nice guy. I got 4% extra credits. Tests are doable, not particularly tricky. Lectures are clear, he's very good at explaining stuffs. Strongly recommended.