Henry Pinkham

I know what you applied math majors are thinking: math 2500 has to be better than math 4061. FALSE. if you plan on taking analysis and optimization with pinkham, well, i am very very sorry for you. this class is IMPOSSIBLE. pinkham cannot teach. the end. choose modern analysis. okay details. the analysis part of the class was terrible-- the textbook, which he is currently writing, makes no sense at all, and you will have to depend on google and yahoo answers (surprisingly helpful!) for any helpful hints to the ridiculous proofs that he wants you to spell out. each hw was like 5 proofs, taking maybe 5 hours per proof. the optimization part of the course wasn't too bad, since i could at least find other sources online to help with those problems, and they were generally simple calculations, using linear algebra at the most complex parts. midterm: incredibly incredible. but you can pass as long as you memorize the hundred definitions, theorems, and proofs that he has in his book. same with the final. the key to passing this class is to show up so he knows who you are. im pretty sure that bumped up my grade a little.

Pinkham is absolutely horrible! He is by far one of the worst professors I've had at Columbia. The subject matter was the potential to be very fascination, but Pinkham absolutely kills everything. He throws notes on the board, barely explains anything and is not capable of answering even the most simple questions. Also, he is incredibly capable of putting anyone and everyone to sleep. He is so unhelpful during office hours, it is not even worth going. He assigns problem sets that take hours to complete and does not teach you the necessary material. The TA (Irina) was amazingly helpful, and even admitted that Pinkham teaches horribly. Also, the textbook (Pedregal) might be the worst book out there. If you take this class, be prepared to work your butt off and learn absolutely nothing. Avoid this class if you can...

Don't take Pinkham for Music Hum. He is a really nice guy but has a real knack for making this class insanely boring. Music Hum is supposed to be one of the best classes at Columbia, but Pinkham really doesn't seem appropriate to me to be teaching it. Just because you have a big cd collection, doesn't mean you can teach music. Plus he gives you bad grades on top of it. Unless you are a music major, you will have no idea what is going on in the class.

If the previous reviews were not enough to dissuade you from taking this class with Pinkham, then you clearly do not care about your GPA. You need this class to graduate you say? Forget about it. Graduate a semester late. Do NOT, i repeat, do NOT take this class with Pinkham. Saying he is a harsh grader is an understatement. You will have a quiz the second day of class that counts for 5% of your grade - according to Pinkham, this is to 'weed' out people. He will say he gives partial credit but he doesn't really - I got one part of a three part question wrong and he gave me a 0 on the whole thing. Appealing won't help. His lectures are abysmal and have nothing to do with the problem sets which are IMPOSSIBLE. You will be working 30+ hours on each problem set and if you are smart, you will be able to do perhaps half of it. He also didn't assign a TA for the first few weeks so that wasn't very helpful. Neither was the Math Help Room - after multiple unsuccessful trips, I realised that no one there knows any Analysis and even the ones who do will not be able to help you with the problem sets. He also wrote his own (unpublished) book for the course and is pretty proud of it. This book might as well be in greek - he uses lots of complex abstract methods to illustrate what could actually be simple concepts. There are also no examples of concepts in his book which he leaves as an exer…

In my opinion, this man is a horrible professor. He can easily put people to sleep. He just talks about examples from the book and doesn't completely go through them but expects us to know how to and puts the hardest questions on the test and fails a lot of students.

If you get Prof. Pinkham, I suggest you switch out NOW. I heard music humanities was supposed to be one of the best courses at Columbia, but taking it with Prof. Pinkham ensures that you will definitely disagree. He not only teaches in an extremely boring way, but he seems to grade essays and papers almost arbitrarily, by simply placing a mark on top of the page without any markings on the entire essay to indicate any reason as to why you deserve this grade. Also, after giving listening homework, he would sometimes surprise us with listening quizzes wherein he would play the song and expect us to recognize it and say something about it, seemingly easy, although sometimes he would play a different version of the piece than what was assigned and expect us to realize that they were both the same pieces. He is extremely aloof and almost indifferent to teaching, never really acknowledging or getting excited when a student would contribute his or her thoughts. His midterm and final were extremely hard to study for, they consisted of him playing pieces we had listened to throughout the semester, and some we had not, forcing you to always second guess whether or not you were identifying a piece you had already listened to or a new one. All in all, a terrible professor who may care for music but not for teaching music. His class made me wonder, why is he even allowed to teach this cour…

don't take this class with pinkham. it will be the worst experience of your college career. you'll come out having learned nothing. from the lectures, you'll wonder if pinkham even knows the math he's teaching. he has a phd, but it sure doesn't seem that way. the lecture notes are long, have unworked examples, and are riddled with typos. in office hours, pinkham doesn't even work out the homework problems...probably because he has no idea how to do them. on that note, neither does the TA. and the homework is long and difficult and graded harshly. finally, the book is a waste of 80 bucks. we used it once all semester and it's horribly written so you can't even learn anything from it. unfortunately, you're going to have to teach yourself all the material (and fail horribly). and you'll probably have a C to go along with it. the grading is ridiculously unfair. pinkham should have never been allowed to teach a mathematics course (or any course, in general). avoid at all costs.

Pinkham is actually the dean of the graduate school for arts and sciences, which means that he doesn't have the kind of time to devote to music hum. Furthermore, while he may have an extensive music collection, he can't seem to figure out how to teach. If you have a background in music theory you may find his lectures more understandable, but if not, he can be confusing. His lectures are disorganized, and he doesn't focus on the interesting things, like music history or culture. Try to get into a better section.

I learned a lot of new skills in terms of linear algebra and also in terms of how to prepare for exams.

analysis and optimization has the potential of being a very useful and applicable subject but you will get none of this from pinkham. the first half of the course was pure analysis for which there was no book and the only study notes we had were the ones that he typed up. these were not clear at all and the important parts were left as exercises for us to do. in class he only talked about the idea behind the proofs and then expected us to know how to do them with the rigor expected from the 4000 level class. the second half of the course is optimization and we used the pedregal book which is one of the worst and most useless books i have ever had for a class. you're basically wasting $80. again he typed up his notes but these were useless. by the end of the semester the whole class had no idea what was going on and no one could do the homework ... not even the TA! his grading at least for the midterm was also pretty bad. he didn't curve according to how the class did but according to how he thought we should do. i'm pretty sure that this man won't hesitate to fail half the class or at least give out loads of Cs. after all, he's a dean. don't take a class with him.