Lectures are complicated but he's verbose so you can scribble down his lectures and study it later. He tends to make things theoretical but he's not complicated and he doesn't go on tangents.

Homework is incredibly hard so go to OH for sure.

Tests are definitely fair. Not easy but the questions aren't designed to trick you.

Definitely take his class unless the alternative is some 5/5 math professor like Keranen or Conley.

I’ve taken 2 classes now with Professor Arant (142 in Winter 2020 and 135 in Spring 2020), and spent more time in his office hours than in lecture by this point probably, so I feel qualified to review him.

Because he’s young, he was also really approachable and easy to ask for help in Office Hours. However, this is where my one issue with this professor comes up. When someone asked him for help with a problem, a good amount of the time he seemed to not want to actually go over the problem very often, and just talk a bunch of math at you, and when he’s done, you’re just kind of pressured into saying “yeah that makes sense” but when you’re actually doing the homework, you still have no idea what to do. In that case you should just ask a friend (if you’re lucky enough to have one) or the TA (if you have one that’s helpful). I think this really just stems from the ever common symptom many really smart math professors here have, where they are so smart that they kind of just leave you in the dust and don’t really slow down in the explanations. Other than that though, his office hours are really helpful and fun simply because he’s easier to approach and talk to than older and more Boomer professors; I know my jokes will actually land with him.

If you have strong feelings about this kind of thing, you might want to steer away from this course if he ever teaches it again, but something else I noticed is the fact that there was no MatLAB used at all in this course. Now I don’t really care because I’m a math major just because I like math, I don’t really care that I didn’t learn those skills of doing things like pandemic modeling with a computer simulation or other programming methods. However, I know those definitely are the skills that many applied math majors are expecting to get out of this course. The root of this stems from the fact that Professor Arant is a VERY pure mathematician, studying computability theory and logic stuff, so he approaches modeling from a very theoretical and, well, pure perspective. If you’re like me and don’t really care, then this is a completely fine class to take. If you’re not, then you might wanna steer clear.

Other than that, I guess I can just end with the fact that exams are very fair and well written, so that isn’t something to worry about. All in all, it’s very clear that he really does care about his students' learning, and puts a lot of thought into his teaching because of it. Just for that I can definitely recommend this professor in this class.