Panagiota Daskalopoulos

Overall a solid class. I find ODEs inherently interesting but didn't really think that this was reflected in Daskalopoulos' teaching in the class. She is a pretty organized lecturer, but consistently shows up late for whatever reason and moves through content quite slowly. Textbook is helpful as a reference. She is more helpful one on one in office hours. Overall would recommend. She is one of the stronger professors in the department.

It's very clear that Prof Daskalopoulos thinks we already know a lot of the material. She went very quickly and many of us were often left to learn a lot from the book. She pushed for engagement but didn't really respond well to questions... or answers. Her exams felt really hard when we took them, but the median was normal (usually mid 70s) and she ended up giving a slight curve on our term grades. I'd taken high school calculus relatively recently but the class was still high effort, so maybe consider a different professor if you are new to calc or haven't taken it in a while!!

This class was definitely not one of the better math classes I have taken. I think most people were rather apathetic about the experience and didn’t feel too strongly about the course in either sense. I found the course straightforward and easy to do well in, but less enjoyable and rewarding than other more challenging math classes that required more ingenuity. The class follows the textbook by Walter Strauss extremely closely, covering chapters 1 through 7. The lectures are so similar to the pages of the textbook to the point that the textbook was often a perfectly good substitute for attending lectures. The lectures themselves are okay, but she does get confused and make mistakes on the board more often than would be optimal. She is very often late to class, and end up rushing at the end and inevitably running overtime. She warned the class on the first day that this class is taught at a higher level than ODEs, with the justification that other departments offer more applied courses in PDEs. This is not wrong, but I also found that this class was taught at a lower level of sophistication than most of the other math classes I have taken. The class is mostly computational, as reflected by the proportion of the problems on homework and exams that were computations. A small number of short proofs are presented in lecture (and the textbook), and most of the proofs on homework and…

Professor Daskalopoulos is very nice and helpful. However, her lectures are right out of the book so it is not a necessity to attend lectures. She can be dull and boring at times but you will learn the material in class. The midterms and final are not curved. The means were in the low 70's to mid 80's. She's probably middle of the road in terms of all the Calc 3 professors, do keep in mind though this is a 9:10-10:25 class, so if you enjoy getting up early to listen to math lectures then this class is for you, otherwise pick another professor.

Basically a good professor. Understands all of the basic concepts quite well. Usually her lectures were fairly understandable, although occasionally she did go a bit fast. The material for this course is relatively difficult, but quite interesting (if you find math interesting). I was able to understand the material and do well having previously taken no course higher than linear algebra. She is open to questions during class and during office hours. On the down side, she was never on time, typically five to ten minutes late. More significantly, she often chose not to do long or complicated algebraic manipulations in class, saying "and you can work it out at home." The steps that she skipped were not really essential, but sometimes I would have liked to have seen them anyway.

A very nice woman who honestly cares about her students' grasp of the material. She will go out of her way to have office hours, give practice tests, and go over hw problems in class. My only problem is that she often spends too much time in class answering questions about material that students should be learning on their own, and forgets to cover new material. The flip side is that she is an easy grader. If you are willing to sit through at least three or four classes which consist of getting nothing accomplished, take this class.

Toti is a gem of a person. She was super kind in office hours and genuinely wanted her students to succeed. That being said, this class was my personal hell. The math starts straightforward enough, but there is so much content covered that both memory of techniques and problem recognition become challenges. I do not recommend taking this class if you do not study physics; as I learned, this material is difficult for everyone, but the physics majors have the advantage of having seen these problems in their other classes, making the curve for the class that much steeper. I devoted probably 20 hours a week to this class and still struggled a lot, and I ended up electing a P/F.

I took calculus I during Fall 2020, which means it was an online class. I have no idea what things would have been like if classes were in person, so take this with a grain of salt. Toti is a lovely teacher. She makes herself available to help students and answers questions very patiently. She was very mindful of international students in different timezones, especially regarding the final exam, and always did revisions in the class before any examination. She's also very friendly and she talked a lot about how she used the stuff she taught us in class in her research, which, at least for me, made the content more interesting. This was the first time Toti taught Calculus I. She's used to teaching higher-level classes. Because of this, sometimes she assumed some things were obvious to us or solved things in a very different fashion from what high school students are probably used to. This made some explanations confusing, but this only happened a few times, mostly in the first classes, before she understood what pace worked best. I think something Toti still has to improve is that she often had typos or little mistakes in her class notes or while solving some problems, so we lost at least a couple of minutes of class every now and then because of that. Still, it was okay and sometimes her mistakes helped me not repeat them in exams lol. Overall, I really liked taking this class…

Prof. Daskalopoulos is wonderful! I had a great time in her class, and I have definitely learned a lot. I do want to stress, though, that this class is difficult and time-consuming (due to the subject matter). An applied math major, I spent an average of 15 frustrating hours a week doing homework. I also found the first couple week's homework to be the hardest, so hang in there. However, Prof. D definitely realizes the complexity of the material and does her best to accommodate. She proceeds at a very manageable pace through the material, keeping to the book so that you can review the material easily. While technically this also made her lectures skip-able, I found myself attending each one because she is a decent lecturer. Her accent is slight, and I got used to it after a few classes. She was also very open to questions, both in office hours and in class. The book we used was by Walter Strauss, and while it was somewhat condensed, it was still easy to read and review. Compared to the homeworks which I found very difficult, the exams were much more straightforward. There were no curveballs. There was one proof on the midterm and a couple on the final, but these were the short ones in the book/homework, so you would do well to review them (there were really only 5 or so proved theorems overall, so it's not much to memorize). The rest of the problems were computational. On a fi…

Weekly problem sets, which while collected, didn't seem to be graded very carefully. Midterm and final, both of which, while not exactly easy, were very doable and fair.