I love this guy. Took this class with Prof Zhou in spring of my senior year and it makes my top five favorite classes and definitely top 5 favorite professors. Zhou is an excellent lecturer, knows the material inside and out, and challenges you without making exams and homework so hard that studying is rendered pointless. There was weekly homework (TA's help a lot so go to discussion), one 50 minute midterm, and a 2 hour final.

He is also SO ORGANIZED! Homework is due on the same day each week, lecture notes are always posted before lecture (so you can print them out and bring them to class to annotate,) and his handwriting is beautiful in a math professor kind of way.

Although lecture notes are posted, and attendance is optional, it was still very much worth it to attend class as the spatial nature of the material often took more explaining than was doable on paper.

tldr: Nice guy, funny, organized, isn't a try-hard, and wants people to learn. Challenging but doable. 10/10 take his class, go to lecture, go to discussion, put in the time, and you'll do great.

If you like not having any idea what you're doing and having no idea why you're doing it, then this class could potentially be a good fit for you. The class starts off with Zhou writing a bunch of proofs with no context or title, simply calling them "proof" and that's about it. I'm not really sure what it was we were supposed to be learning but I can assure you, I did not learn it. I recommend taking Chen.

Zhou is one of my favorite professors in the Stats department and I like the way he teaches math. Usually professors who teach math write messily on the board and doesn't pay attention to whether students understand the lecture. But Zhou was very clear throughout every class and always made sure to review the pre-req concepts. He doesn't shy away from giving proofs but you always learn a lot about the details of how the math works, which is not emphasized in many other Stats classes (ie. 101 series).

Coding isn't as important in 102B as it is in 102A or 102C, since this class is mostly about linear algebra and optimization. Homework problems (this year's TA gave away the solutions) and exams were focused on concepts rather than computation, but they weren't nearly as challenging as Christou's. I would recommend Zhou because he was a good lecturer and knew his stuff inside out.