Christos Papadimitriou

One difficult pset a week. They took me about 5-10 hours depending on the pset, and they had to be typed.

Take a class with Christos!! He cares a lot about his students and is a fascinating and wonderful person to know. His office hours have been one of the best parts of my college experience. His psets are difficult, but he is flexible, helpful, and brilliant. Also, he is the author of multiple novels and a wonderful comic book series called logicomix. Ask him about it in his office hour sometime.

Weekly psets (difficult), midterm, final, weekly (optional) quizzes for bonus points

Christos Papadimitriou is easily one of the best teachers, not just in the CS department, but at the whole university. Rather then just writing summaries of the text book on the board for students to copy, he actually engages the students and instills the core principles of concepts in each lecture. He also adds fun historical facts and jokes throughout his lectures. His weekly psets were quite challenging, but that’s by nature of the subject. Christos doesn’t hide the fact that his psets are challenging, and consistently encourages students. He even throws “homework parties” during the semester, where he books a conference room and orders food, and lets students collaborate on the give. Pset together. I’ve never had a teacher more invested in their students success. As an added bonus, Christos isn’t just some random lecturer. He’s one of the most famous and accomplished theoretical computer scientists in the world. Having access to such a legend is truly astonishing. In his office hours, he’s willing to discuss anything research related. He’s also one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever met. If you’re lucky enough to be able to take a class with Christos, take it!

Don't listen to the haters. This class was fantastic. It was a bit disorganized sometimes, to be fair, but that ended up affecting my experience barely marginally. If you're paying attention in class, you will learn so much. Papa goes through a ton of material, but it's all very meaningful; we covered some really cool topics like game theory and quantum computing. Papa is a living legend and you can tell. He's an expert on these areas to the nth degree and knows how to teach it effectively and kindly. Definitely an amazing teacher. The TAs were honestly very good. Prompt with Piazza questions, and as accommodating as possible. Take this class if you want to put in a bit of work, but want to get a lot out of it as well.

Just want to mention, with overwhelming bad reviews, the first two reviews (which happen when everything is in person) are overwhelmingly good. I actually take this course due to those reviews. I do think Professor Papadimitriou is nice and knowledgable, and I don't know what happen to the course for this online version. Just want to point to the reviews for in-person course so that people can have their own judgement.

I really do not know how people got through his lectures in person. His zoom class was a disaster, from the TAs to the exams to homework assignments. Awful and painful class. It's funny that he confuses himself a lot of times, and then ask "IS IT CLEAR?" How the hell it is clear when you don't even know what you are talking about!!! He really is a super nice and approachable professor. He smiles all the time and answers your questions and replies to your email, but that really doesn't change how bad this class is.

This was a truly horrible class. Do not take this with Papa, whatever you do. Just because he's famous doesn't mean he can teach or explain. Insane workload, lots of it not on important/relevant topics to what most people actually care about algorithms for - interviews. Do yourself a favor, take this with literally anyone else. Better yet, pray that you have TAs that care enough about students to change the direction of a terribly run course.

LMAO how much are we willing to bet that one of the butthurt TAs wrote the review from April 6? It’s obviously a bullshit review made to save face. Anyways, all the other reviews from 2021 are completely accurate. I agree that Christos is probably a nice person, it’s just his lack of organization and terrible TAs that make this class trash. The format of a Zoom semester plays a hand in it too, but I honestly don’t think things would be that much different if we were in-person with the same TAs.