Sabin Cautis

Problem sets are occasionally tedious, but never too long. First MT was a breeze for me, whereas the second was not too tough, but I got confused by all of the formulae and how to set up the dx/dA/dt in all of the different integrals. This should be remediable for the final.

- really light - weekly problem set (1-2 hrs per week) - two midterms - one final

Sabin Cautis is an excellent instructor. He has a Harvard PhD and teaching experience from Rice, but neither of those statements sheds light on his ability to present the material in an enlightening and inspiring manner. At times the material involving Green's theorem, divergence Theorem, and others was quite confusing, but Sabin was always very approachable. Over the semester there were two different stand-ins, one of whom was equally adept at presenting the material in a comprehensible and engaging manner, and another who was incredibly confusing and difficult to follow. It made Sabin's teaching style seem incredible by comparison. Sabin's familiarity with the problem sets and teaching material for the imaginary calculus section of the course was a bit sub-par, but since he was probably rocking the Putnam exam (again) while he wasn't teaching class, I think we can excuse him.

Although young (I thought he was a TA) and rather shy, Cautis overall is a really good teacher. His notes are very clear and logical. His assignments are really short and sweet. His lectures end 15 minutes early every class! Although his lectures are not the most exciting on earth, he really enjoys teaching and watching him teach is very entertaining (he is good eye candy). Overall, this class is definitely worth taking. It fulfills several requirements and is really easy!

Problem sets that take 1-2 hours a week.

I would recommend Cautis for calc III. He talks clearly, writes clearly, and is very smart. He goes through material slowly but calc III does not cover much material so this may be more of a fault with the class than his teaching. He does do lots of examples in class. If you go to the lectures then the problems on the hmwks and midterms will be very familiar. An A is not difficult to get.

20% unreliably weekly problem sets, lowest one dropped 20% Midterm 1 20% Midterm 2 40% Final

While I thought Sabin was quietly effective, the class material is soft to begin with, so there wasn’t much pressure for an outstanding instructor. That being said I learned solid material with relative ease and I think Sabin deserves some credit for that. Yes, he has an accent and he talks softly. But this isnt an issue if you sit near the front of his class, as I did. I thought his examples were nicely instructive even if they were straight out of the book. Some frustration owed to that his problem sets often had patchy resemblance to what he showed in class, so although they were short, they often took longer than I wished. Definitely not difficult though. If you took multivariate before, there's no need to come to class. I didn't, so the lectures were helpful and it helped to do extra practice problems. The one issue with this class I thought was that about a quarter of the class had taken multivariate before, so the class average was unfriendly to a generous curve. Sabin was, I think, as passionate as you can possibly be about multivariate. We finished much earlier than he anticipated so he showed us some linear algebra, some theoretical grounding for we learned as a way to give more intellectual zest to what was pretty rote material. He would often try to get us to “ponder the reasoning behind formulas and such. He (half-heartedly) wanted to infect his students with ferv…

A weekly problem set consisting of 6 problems. 2 midterms (not cumulative) that are very straightforward and easy to do well on if well prepared. 1 cumulative final, a little harder than the midterms, but still very doable.

Cautis' class was definitely my favorite class this semester. Although his lectures weren't particularly interesting, they were straightforward and conveyed the necessary material to complete the homeworks and do well on the exams. He is clearly a brilliant guy, however, he often makes computational mistakes on the board, which might make it difficult to study from your notes. In general, his notes are quite complete and provide many examples to demonstrate the sometimes esoteric concepts that are covered in Calc 3. The first two exams were extremely straightforward and not difficult at all. The final exam was harder than I expected given that the midterms were extremely easy. However, it still was very possible to do well on all three exams. Overall, I definitely recommend taking Calc 3 with Cautis.