Brian Cole

This course is hard. Brian Cole was an interesting and engaging lecturer, but often times lectures were spent deriving and/or proving certain physics concepts/equations and often not about how to apply them to the psets. The course is difficult even if you've taken any kind of AP Physics course in high school. I do not recommend this course unless you're a prospective physics major, in which case this feels like one of those courses that will toughen you right up for the rest of your time in college.

Our class this year was kinda a mess tbh. I didn't take 1601 (Mechanics & Relativity) in the fall but from what I heard the class was supposed to finish special relativity but Prof. Cole instead dragged it into 1602 and spent almost the first 2 months covering it. As a result, the later topics (magnetic fields, induction, etc) were kinda rushed and he even had to upload the last topic as an online supplementary lecture. In addition, we were assigned several options for a second midterm replacement during reading week, as we did not progress through the material as fast as he planned, and still had two assignments due after finals week ended. The TA's typically do not grade assignments on time so for most of the term you are left wondering how you are faring in this class. I feel like I would advise this class only if you are strongly interested in physics/are a physics major and can deal with some of his organizational problems--which from past reviews, seems to be an occurring theme.

Brian Cole is an incredibly intelligent and articulate professor. He strongly understands the course material and it is truly incredible to learn from someone who does such interesting and fun research. However, this class will become a completely miserable experience if you don't already have a somewhat decent understanding of physics. The psets are long and tedious. My semester he committed a frankly heinous decision to make homeworks due at 7am on sundays as an accommodation for the jewish students who could not submit homeworks on saturday. He assigned a pset over thanksgiving break and frankly just showed flagrant disregard for his students' other priorities (such as sleeping). I was one of many engineering students to drop to 1402 with Dodd the following semester. If you are an engineering student and do not have an immense passion for physics, stick to 1401.

Let me just say first, Professor Cole seems like a genuinely nice guy and tries really hard. Please note I said try. It was unfortunate this semester. He went back and forth from Cern in the beginning of the semester causing us to have a shaky start. Ahh but that was just the beginning. I came from Prof. Hughes' class which was fairly straight forward despite the occasional curve balls. Pretty solid class. However Cole wishes for you to "understand the physics" and thus proves a lot of equations in the class that I found to be pretty useless. Problem sets helped so if you have to take the class do them religiously. Speaking of which, the problem sets from the textbook aren't too bad as you can find loads of help on the internet and from your genius friends. However if you have to interpret his own handmade problems you may need someone that "speaks Cole" to even understand what he's looking for. Tests... He lets you bring in one page of notes for formulas and such you may need. There are two exams and I can't say how well they are spread out as the first test essentially only covered Gauss's Law. I thought they were pretty hard. I guess the man is busy and he's used to teaching an advanced class so he was "dumbing the class down" but if you are looking for a straightforward class best to avoid this one.

Brian Cole is a BAMF. I learned far more from a year of Cole's problem sets than from any other class at Columbia. If you just suck it up and actually do the never-ending problem sets you end up learning more than you even know until you see it all again in other classes, PDE, Into Quant, Linear Algebra, Mechanics, all begin with problems easier than the ones treated in Cole's problem sets. A genuinely great intro to studying physics. The guy actually knows what's going on, and he's also busy as hell, but was still willing to do an occasional night lecture if we were falling behind. I don't know why you would pay for Columbia and not take such a sweet class, just wish I hadn't slept through so many lectures....

I was in this class for about two-and-a-half weeks before I dropped down to 1403. Professor Cole is a very thorough professor, and expects you to be able to learn a lot of fundamental concepts very quickly. In the first week I had to pick up differential equations. In the second it was complex exponentials. And in the future it was going to be linear algebra and partial differential equations, and who knows what else. If you have a solid math background and are interested in covering everything there is to know about describing and analyzing waves, then by all means, take this class. But if you only want to take it because it looks better than 1403, you'll end up in 1403 anyways. Oh, and the day that I went to the 1403 professor to get my add/drop form signed, three other people were there asking the same thing. A class of 65 had fallen to 38 in three weeks.

One of the worst teachers I have ever encountered. He is a super nice teacher and he means well but he cannot teach. He paces back and forth constantly and he talks to the chalkboard. He'll try to help you during his office hours. Often the office hours don't help either. Avoid taking him!

Before taking Cole's class last semester, I read the review above by a student who took his 1401-1402 course. Due to the scathing nature of this review, I prepared for the worst. What I found completely flabbergasted me. Professor Cole is one of the nicest human beings in the physics department, always available and glad to see students in his office hours. He is patient, enthusiastic, and really cares about his students. Every class he asked if there were any problems with his homework sets or with their due dates. He held extra lectures on his own time to catch us up when we fell behind in material, and even scheduled a fun optional lecture on quantum tunneling at the end of the course because he thought the material was so cool. He also likes to see enthusiastic students poke their heads up above the silent crowd. His chalkboard notes weren't perfect, but he really reaches those who truly listen to him. His explanations made sense! I learned more in his one-semester course than I could have possibly imagined, and I now feel significantly better prepared for future study in physics than the students who took the two-semester 2801-2802 track. For whatever reason, the student who did the previous review was completely out of his/her mind, and I think it would be a shame if other students missed out on so good a professor because of that terrible and unfair review.

Revision of my previous review since there were typos and missing information, my apologies: I had taken PHYS 1601/1602 with Brian (he was comfortable with his students calling him Brian!) back between the 2021-2022 school year. I will say, I did find it to be quite an immersive pair of courses! We learned about the concepts behind kinematics, circular motion, electricity, and magnetism, as well as some principles of relativity. It commanded understanding of these concepts and knowing the “why” behind things when working with equations applied to different scenarios. I found that to be an interesting difference from easier physics classes, where those would often be plugging in values and calculating the answer. I, however, won’t deny the challenge of the content. I had gone into it as a CS major and I felt myself lagging behind other students in terms of understanding the content, to the point where I felt it works best for those planning to study physics or related topics. There was a problem set a week, which did get overwhelming even when split evenly throughout the week because of how difficult I found the content to be. The exams also felt fairly challenging, albeit roughly the same difficulty as the homework assignments. That being said, he was very accommodating and dedicated as a professor and instructor. He had office hours many times a week – something you almost ne…

We love an old man running around the lecture room -- prof Cole definitely has that energy but sometimes his way of descriptions is not easy to understand (e.g. he uses the word "facile" to describe an integration). I went to basically every single one of his lecture because I needed to be in that room to focus and understand but frankly I'd say if you have time reading over the textbook is better than going to lectures but that's too laborious for a lot of people. He makes mistakes in class but office hours are helpful because you gives abundant hints.