Preface: this is a review for math 31B with Professor Greene not 32A

Imagine: you are a first-year bio major having just taken AP Calculus BC and you need to start your major prerequisites, one of which is the math series.

"Oh, calc 31b should be easy," you think. "I mean, I just finished calc bc so it should be a nice way to ease into a college courseload..." Ten weeks later your skin is oily, you haven't slept in a week, and all of your hair has turned grey as the final exam approaches and you are even MORE confused about calculus now than you were before you took the class.

Let me get something straight, this class is not taught by Professor Greene, it is taught by Sal Khan and the archived videos of your high school calc bc teacher. Professor Greene's lectures are so convoluted and his notes are so messy that you will have a better chance of translating hieroglyphs than you will in trying to understand his thought process. The TA's in this class genuinely try to make the course material understandable, but when faced with mass confusion as every single student has multiple questions to answer in only a 50 minute period, it is impossible to make up for Professor Greene's incapability as a teacher.

Generally, the workload is manageable on non Gradescope homework days. But on the weeks that Professor Greene assigns written homework, your time is better spent writing your will and picking out a cute coffin than it is trying to understand his extremely vague questions or deciphering his chicken scratch. The written homework for this class is so mentally taxing that each assignment has a high chance of landing you in the ICU by question 3.

There is no doubt that professor Greene knows the material; the issue is that he is utterly incapable of conveying it to undergrad students in such a way that is comprehensible. Other students in the line for Rende have confused me for an upperclassman because the insomnia caused by this class has led to eyebags that rival the soulless look of a 4th year with thousands of dollars in student loans, an unpaid internship with a misogynist boss, and 4 research papers to write. For the sake of your mental, physical, emotional, and academic health, please please please do not take this class.

I actually had Greene for Math 31B but it was not listed as an available choice so I am reviewing him under this class. I had taken Calculus AB and BC in high school and did very well in both of their classes. All of the material that we went over in Math 31B was material that I was already very familiar with, yet the tests that Greene gave were equivalent to the difficulty of upper division math courses and were close to impossible. His lectures are next to useless, the practice midterm problems, while similar to the difficulty of his midterm problems, offer no help at all for the midterm. Also, he decided that no practice problems for the final was better than giving us an idea of what would be on the final. This is only my first quarter at UCLA and I can already say this will be the worst professor I will have here. At least I hope so, because otherwise I think I might end myself. Don't ever take this professor for any class he teaches.

I actually took math 31b with Greene but I need to literally post this asap so everyone knows NOT TO TAKE GREENE FOR ANY CLASS. I literally taught the entire class to myself because his lectures were useless. I swear I spent every second of the day studying for this class and still struggled because his tests were so difficult. I got a 5 on ab calc and an A in math 31a so I'm not awful at math but this class was the death of me. Our average for our second midterm was 55. Steer clear.

the TA haiyu is mad, he is applying to us the grading standards of grad students, every time I check my hw score I can hardly breathe. I donno why he is doing this to us, he looks like a nice guy and lectures well, but tbh I never wanna meet him again as a TA

As a disclaimer, I am writing this before I take the final and receive a grade for the class to be as non-biased as I can be. First time writing a review here, so I'll try to update what grade I got.

Greene is an incredibly funny and down to earth guy who is great to talk to. In office hours, he really takes the time trying to explain certain concepts and ensuring you understand everything. His homework sets are challenging, but fair and the week of time is enough to be able to completely solve them.

However, there are some flaws with his class in my eyes. At least for me, and some of my other classmates, Greene's lectures can be a bit difficult to follow and his hand writing is a bit messy. Greene will often go onto tangents about material not related to class or sometimes not baby you through a process/proof because it is simply natural to him. The guy has been doing math longer than I've been born, so it's expected some of the stuff he's teaching is just second nature to him. For someone who has never taken analysis though, this can be challenging to fully understand what he is saying. I also personally don't mind him going on tangents, but others do.

Greene's hand writing also makes it hard to sometimes read what he is teaching, his notes, or the homework assignments. A few times the homework assignments have had typos, but Greene always makes sure to correct them via email.

For me and many others, Greene's notes are a god send. His notes are concise and have a nice flow to them making it easy to learn the material through them. However, it still runs into the issue of messy hand writing. So from time to time you'll be squinting your eyes.

Greene also uses a separate email from his myucla email to send out various things because his myucla email doesn't work. This is fine and all, but many times his emails would go to my spam folder randomly. MAKE SURE TO BE IN A CONSTANT HABIT of checking your spam folder if you take a class with him, so you don't miss out on his emails. His emails usually have notes, homework, and study guides attached to them.

Greene's myucla is also a bit disorganized, but not terrible. Greene labels all his notes and such via the date he gave the lecture or published them. This is fine, but makes it difficult to exactly find the topic you want to review or take a look at. Our class ourselves had to make our own drive with the notes labelled for ease of access.

The midterms are killer for Greene. The questions themselves aren't too hard, but with only 50 minutes to do them and some of the proofs being quite long. Most often run out of time. The average was around a 35% on the first midterm and a 50% on the second midterm. Unsure how he's gonna grade the distribution at the end of the class, but that's how it was for the midterms. To have success on the midterms, I highly advise you go back through each note set and make sure you can do the important proofs by memory. I also recommend doing this for previous homework. The name of the game here is speed and most of Greene's midterms problems come from his lecture notes and homework assignments. I always felt Greene's midterms were fair, but really tested if you could discern what the question was asking in time.

On a separate topic, our TA was Nicholas. The TA strike is still ongoing, so we did not have him for all of the quarter. Nicholas is an INCREDIBLY hard grader as a TA and does most of the homework and midterm grading. He's extremely good at making sure your arguments are rigorous, but not so great for your homework or midterm scores. The class is graded on some distribution, not discerned how it is, but it can be a bit unmotivating for some. Nicholas graded the 1st midterm, while Greene did the 2nd and the averages definitely shows the rigor in grading between the two (although part of it is also due to people knowing more of what to expect for the 2nd midterm). Overall, Nicholas is a great TA who does a great job explaining stuff in detail and making sure you can prove stuff rigorously. He is an incredibly harsh grader as a result, but a nice guy. Certainly a good TA to have, but just be prepared to have a great amount of attention to detail.

Overall, I think Greene's 131AH class has been incredibly enjoyable. You can tell he really cares about his students and is passionate about the material. I do think following the class only from his lecture can be difficult at times. Consulting outside sources and referencing his notes HEAVILY will be your key to success.

Take this class if you are interested in math. Professor Greene is an excellent instructor for this honor-level course. He is great at explaining difficult topics, and he gives a lot of examples and intuition behind those abstract concepts. The professor teaches a lot more than what's in the standard Math 115A class. Some homework problems might be challenging, but the professor and the TA are pretty helpful in answering questions. Many problems on the midterms and final are already discussed in class. The final consisted of 11 proof-based problems, which was terribly long and took 15+ hours to complete, but this will probably be different if this class is offered on-campus after the Covid-19 period. Overall, this class is suitable for those who love math or those who want to study deeper in linear algebra.

Worst math class ever… if you want to take 115ah, find another class. This will ruin your life and your passion to math! RUN

This class is AWESOME! I really love the HW questions he gave us. All the questions can be connected with each other and push us to think and comprehend the theory better!

His class is also easy to follow! Before taking the class, I've seen many people said that 131A is hard. Now it's my fortune to have Greene to teach us - everything is perfectly clear and he really made this class interesting!

However, as others have noted, the TA Haiyu H is my only concern for this class. I have no idea how he graded our homework but it seems like he is a human compiler that can catch every single piece of trivial bug

Professor Greene was probably the single worst math professor I have ever had in my entire life. However, a lot of reviews unfairly characterize him as some sort of eldritch monstrosity. Greene is obviously very intelligent, and he does obviously care about his students. His office hours for example were very generous, there were three available every week-lasting until every single question asked by every single student was answered. Most math professors- even the nice ones-don't dedicate this much time to genuinely trying to teach the material. The issue is he's a terrible teacher and all this time was useless.

The tests were terrible. They were almost entirely unrelated to the homework, however, if you go to all the lectures you are technically exposed to all the material.

In summary, Professor Greene is probably one of the nicest people I've ever met. But do NOT take his class. Don't even consider it. Wait the extra quarter.

Professor Greene was a very unique professor, to say the least. I came in having never taken Calculus before, and suffice to say, it was very challenging. He's not the traditional teacher where he explains concepts and gives examples, he dives straight into proofs, and like what everyone else said, he does expect you to know alot of basic Calculus. Most of my class was composed of students who had already taken Calculus before, so it was probably a cinch for them. He doesn't teach in the same order as his colleagues does, some of the stuff he taught I learned again in 31B. His class is broken down into 10% quizzes, which is one problem taken straight from the last week's homework, 20% each for the two midterms and a 50% final.

The homework, and therefore the quizzes, were fairly easy. They were challenging problems, most of them proofs, but he gives you the solutions beforehand, so if worse comes to worse you can always memorize the solutions.

First midterm was alright, again it was mostly proofs, and he gives you sample midterm problems. Only problem is that the sample problems were composed of ~30 problems/proofs, and he picked some of the hardest ones. The average was a 74%. Second midterm was a bit harder, again he gave sample problems but this time he switched up the numbers a bit. Average was a 68%. The final was composed of 10 problems, plus an extra credit problem. Each problem was multiple parts and contained a proof of some sort. This time he gave us a list of topics to study, and some of those were on the final word for word. The average was a 57% if I remember correctly.

Overall, his lectures were pretty boring, he tries to do the proofs in class but sometimes he goes on tangents trying to explain them. I recommend getting a calculus book of some sort (probably the one used by the school) and just watching the MIT lectures. You'll probably get more out of it.

Conclusion: If you've taken Calculus before, this class should be a piece of cake. Even if you haven't, as long as you have decent memorization skills, you should scrape at least a B. However, if you're trying to learn the material (for people who haven't taken Calculus), I recommend taking another professor.