Tat Fung

He does have a good knowledge of the material, but he is a very very very bad teacher. Do not take his class if you can avoid him.

If you care about your health and wellbeing, DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS. On the first day of class Professor Fung seemed like a really sweet, wholesome guy that loved statistics, so for some reason, I assumed this would make him a decent professor---I couldn't have been more wrong. There was so much wrong with his lectures and exams for an INTRODUCTORY class. His lectures were hard to follow and very abstract---he used mathematical concepts that were outside the scope of what's expected in traditional calc-based stats courses. I had to reteach myself almost all the concepts outside of class time which became way too much of an expected time commitment for a 3 credit class. We were not provided a practice midterm and told that the midterm would be similar to our homework, and although some questions included similar topics, the midterm was significantly more difficult and complex. The second part of the midterm had NO PARTIAL CREDIT, yet they were multi-step and objectively more difficult than part I—Professor Fung told us not to attempt these problems unless we were confident we could fully complete them... After the midterm, he gave us the opportunity to introduce ourselves and communicate any concerns with the class over email but did not reply or seem to show much concern. The final was similar in the sense that it was ridiculously difficult. In conclusion, if you need to take…

Root solving, PDE finite difference, interpolation - ?

He is really really REALLY terrible i'm sorry. I don't know why he's teaching this course given that he has a (seemingly) demanding full time job at an investment bank. He uploads absolutely nothing onto canvas - no practice tests, no practice questions and absolutely nothing that would indicate what he expects us to know. Oh wait my bad, he expects us to know the textbook in its entirety!! No cheatsheets for the tests too and he thinks he's funny by saying that it would be cheating if he allowed them. His class gave me anxiety but the therapists at Columbia are good so I would recommend scheduling your appointments with them after class :))

Interpolation, Root solving, PDE Finite difference, Monte Carlo, ...

Awful, awful experience taking his class. Problems were as follows: 1) Prerequisites: The class lists only one semester of calculus as a prerequisite, but Professor Fung regularly expects students to utilize concepts from Calculus II, multivariable calculus, and even linear algebra. 2) Courseworks: Nothing is posted on courseworks (no slides, no notes, nothing). There are no resources given besides the textbook, which is unfortunately not very well written. 3) Lectures: Professor Fung introduces many ideas by proving them mathematically without giving context or intuition for what is going on. Everything is very abstract and hard to follow. 4) Office hours: Professor Fung makes it nearly impossible to utilize his office hours. For the first 1/3 of the semester, he had no consistent office hours time (he would sporadically announce day-of that he was "trying out a new office hours time" which of course nobody showed up to because he announced it with next to no notice). He also asks that you email him ahead of time if you plan to attend his office hours, and if nobody shows up in the first ten minutes of his office hours, he cancels them and leaves. 5) Slow grading: This is not entirely Professor Fung's fault, but it took a month for the midterm to be graded, and the homeworks are graded even more slowly (I'm not exaggerating).

PDE, MLES, root solving, interpolation......

The grade distribution was unreasonable, and the very difficult Midterm and Final had way too much weight.

Nothing really. The course code should probably start with 2 judging by its simplicity. The entire class learnt a prehistoric language (if VBA is even considered a language) which is outdated and hard to use.

1 homework with 4-6 questions per week, 1 midterm, 1 final Reasonable workload but given the amount of time you need to self-study to actually understand something, the expected hours you need to dedicate to this class is heavy.