Gieseker was not a bad professor, but not a great one either. The material was taught in a semi-straightforward (if boring) way. The midterm and final mirrored the homework material and the stuff we learned in class well (no surprises). My TA was incredible and basically made the class easy (Duncan). He is accessible, there was a grading mistake on one of my tests and he quickly corrected it. There's a little confusion on whether your homework counts towards the final grade, during my class, it didn't, but it was still helpful for the tests. If you have to take Math 61, your experience will be fine with this guy

MATH 110AH is a really fun course. The first week or two is spamming division algorithm and GCD and the remaining eight weeks is group theory. Having a strong linear algebra background really helps with this course. Now, independent of the course we have DAG. I have no idea how to feel about DAG. On one hand, his lectures are hard to follow and pulls random stuff out like dropping the takehome midterm on a brisk saturday afternoon without warning. On the other hand, he has to be one of the nicest profs I have ever have and really wants everyone to succeed. I ended up just reading Pinter's Abstract Algebra text and Elman's notes (which in itself i found a bit hard to read). There was a midterm, take home midterm and a final. The midterm was not too hard but the average was probably like 100+. The take home midterm is 19 problems (only 8 of which are graded) and its essentially one really big proof which has a REALLY satisfying end result. The final was 5 questions and 6 EC questions. The 5 regular questions were pretty easy but those 6 EC questions were pretty difficult. The graded homework was like 1 question per week. Unless you keep practicing the material with questions not assigned to you, its really easy to slip and fall behind. However, our TA, Ben, is one of the best TAs I've ever had and would answer my dumb questions a bunch.

Note to self: DAG classes hard

A really nice guy with a sense of humor. But at the same time, frankly, I learned nothing from him.