Allen is a nice guy, but he operates under a high, possibly unconscious, assumption that students somehow know material from 115A other upper division math courses. It's clear that this is his first time teaching Math 61. The homeworks are unnecessarily time-consuming, cryptic, and difficult. Allen paces the material quite quickly and doesn't spend a lot of time on how techniques to writing proofs. He often stutters in lecture and doesn't have much stage presence which is extremely problematic considering how early he teaches (his 9AM lectures are terrible).

Ben Spitz, one of this class's TAs, is a saving grace. He is an extremely kind and knowledgeable instructor who always tries to help out during review sessions and office hours. Anyway, be careful taking this class. Although midterms were easy, the content will often times leave you scratching your head in pure bewilderment and many hours will be spent self-studying the material.

Homework is extremely difficult to the point of being nigh impossible sometimes without going to office hours/looking up answers/attending the hours he's reserved for his students at the student math center. Tests are very very different. They test on memorization of definitions of theorems and lemmas for half of them and there's not too many proofs on the test. The true or false sections are killer though. I enjoy this hard homework and easier test format. Additionally, I've heard that Gehret made this class to be more rigorous and based more around number theory. I often spend anywhere from 5 to 15 hours a week on the homework, but YMMV. As a math major I feel like this class, though hard, has prepared me better for proofs.