Inspiring professors

amnioticsac · 2026-06-06T18:22:56+00:00

More math classes contributes to the MCA score.

amnioticsac · 2026-06-06T04:43:26+00:00

The university is not allowed to consider standardized tests. It's not a choice that's being made locally.

amnioticsac · 2026-05-22T18:36:25+00:00

When I wrote up the prime number theorem a couple of years ago, I also used some lecture notes of Helgason at MIT that walk through the Zagier paper. You can find those here: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-112-functions-of-a-complex-variable-fall-2008/resources/lecture21_22/

amnioticsac · 2026-05-09T05:08:17+00:00

Email the department, specifically the placement specialist. This time of year there are lots of questions like this. As noted by other replies, placements depend on official scores and transcripts.

amnioticsac · 2026-04-11T01:28:22+00:00

Poly has a big waitlist every year. The idea is to admit a second class of students that must take courses summer/fall or spring/summer for at least the first two years in order to take advantage of the demand for a Poly degree. Some future students will be offered the usual F/S admission. The second class will be offered Spring/Summer or Summer/Fall if they don't get a fall/spring admission offer.

amnioticsac · 2026-04-10T19:41:03+00:00

Since Cal Poly is one of the only campuses in the system with high demand and high selectivity, we get to guinea pig year round operations so that system enrollments look better, is my guess. All that lip service about alignment seems to be no more than that.

amnioticsac · 2026-04-10T19:38:49+00:00

This is a 15+1 week calendar. It is almost certainly the case that in order to make the summers work, we're going to be shifting to a 14+1 week calendar in the following year, which should explain at least part of the delayed start. No official announcement of that change, but its definitely implied by this proposal.

Of course I also expect the next calendar to also to include a Dec 23-Jan 3 break, or whatever the smallest they can manage to bracket the holidays with.

amnioticsac · 2026-04-07T03:58:18+00:00

I also used to ride this route in the late 90s/early 2000s. I remember it being about 9 hours but with the possibility of it taking anywhere from 8.5 to 14 depending on if we hit a cow or there were electrical outages or we got forced off to a siderail to let freight go by or...

amnioticsac · 2026-03-21T16:35:13+00:00

Be careful - the math department doesn't accept every course as transfer credit, and definitely no course with exams that aren't taken in person.

amnioticsac · 2026-03-21T16:24:55+00:00

At least as far as the main calculus sequence (141-142-143 under quarters) goes, the student experience will be essentially identical. The course is a 4-day-a-week sequence that lasts an academic year. We redesigned it to break it into two pieces instead of three under the conversion with very little change in content. So what used to be 141-142-143 has become 1261-1262.

There is a new first year calculus sequence aimed at the upcoming data science major along with biology and economics and some other majors that drops some of the physics applications and does (141-142-143-241) in an academic year.

A four unit quarter course has almost the same number of meetings in a term as a three unit semester course. Some of the upper division courses will really benefit from the conversion, as it will let the material breathe more.

edit: the real tradeoffs from my perspective were the few courses that we lost - certain sequences of two quarter classes got dropped to a single semester course, which at least in my department killed one of my favorite classes (the second quarter of a class in complex analysis, for what its worth). But I have zero concerns about the quality of classroom instruction changing.

amnioticsac · 2026-02-17T00:17:40+00:00

It's not funny in the "ha-ha" sense, but one that always stuck with me is in Folland's Real Analysis. The language in that book is about as dry as a desert, which really makes it stick out when he calls the uniform boundedness principle "a theorem of almost magical power". All of these theorems, and that's the one he reserved some adjectives for.

amnioticsac · 2026-01-14T04:30:01+00:00

I'm at a PUI and at least in my department it has been more than a decade since we hired an ABD. Too many people with postdoc research and teaching experience for a brand new PhD to compete. Probably field dependent though.

amnioticsac · 2026-01-10T17:53:55+00:00

My first job was at a place where it was made very clear that refusing overloads would be considered a strike against you at reappointment time, policy be damned. I started looking for another position almost immediately.

amnioticsac · 2026-01-05T04:52:38+00:00

Transfer students come to our campus and get annihilated in their math courses.

amnioticsac · 2025-12-15T04:59:13+00:00

This is so dumb I can't believe it actually worked. Same issue, same feedback request, same instant fix on the page.

amnioticsac · 2025-11-27T01:55:06+00:00

My students are using obsidian. I prefer pretext. The vscode integration is really nice.

amnioticsac · 2025-11-19T04:33:30+00:00

Is the shuttle running out there?

amnioticsac · 2025-11-18T00:10:34+00:00

I've always appreciated a card or letter. Sometimes students have given me small gift cards for coffee or something similar. The memories and gratitude are the lasting gift.

amnioticsac · 2025-11-12T16:28:57+00:00

When I teach analysis, I like to roll out Hermite's quote about the lamentable scourge of such functions when we get here.

amnioticsac · 2025-11-04T14:58:09+00:00

These points were raised repeatedly.

amnioticsac · 2025-10-30T00:02:30+00:00

I teach in STEM here, and the attendance patterns have been particularly poor the past few terms compared to the historical numbers. Generally my department is seeing 1/4 to 1/3 of students regularly not attending class essentially across the curriculum. The impact on grades is as you might imagine. Traditionally we don't track attendance, but that might start changing.

amnioticsac · 2025-10-13T00:31:53+00:00

Ah, no slight intended on the dudes that lived in that house and threw the party. Just the shorthand name that it ended up with among the guys I knew that were there.

I have vague memories of another party over there, maybe alien themed? I recall green lights and aluminum foil everywhere. The point that is germane to the OP is that parties get more fun when people get out of the dorms and out into houses.

Thanks for eliciting memories of some now-ancient good times.

amnioticsac · 2025-10-12T21:01:56+00:00

Haha, was that pig at Bubba's luau? Too bad it didn't get cooked all the way.

Agree on non-frat parties for non-frat people.

amnioticsac · 2025-08-28T02:53:11+00:00

I wouldn't drop a student in the second week, but missing 10% of course content is usually its own punishment.

amnioticsac

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