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 am surprised to see that Greene has some of the lowest scores at UCLA. His problem sets are hard but actually interesting (not boring repetitive "skill building" like the textbooks). His insistence that everyone know the chain rule perfectly is probably the most useful thing I learned in math... Overall, Greene's style is both practical and interesting.

I took his class during my first year. I got 68/100 on my final, ranking 16/100, and got a solid B. Just to let you guys know his grading though. If you want to succeed in this class, you need to memorize his proofs and write them out during exams even if you can't understand it.

All in all: Do not take him if you are not that smart. Cuz he is really smart, or even too smart for lower div classes.

Prof. Greene is definitely a good professor.He knows every topic about this course(he presented his lecture without any note on hand!)
However, he is NOT a good teacher(at least for low division courses).His lecture notes were vague and totally unorganized.What was worse,he always assumed we could understand them and just skipped to the next topic---while I believe most of us were still thinking what happened just now.
Anyway, though I believe Prof. Greene is smart I will NOT take any of his courses in the future. I would avoid him if I could go back the beginning of this term.
The last of the last, thanks to my TA Jordy, I survived this course because of him.

Much too smart to be an undergraduate professor. He clearly knows a lot about the subject, but tends to thing that people know more than they do. Very difficult to keep up with in lecture, and if you go to Office Hours its usually crammed with other confused people. I would think he'd be a great upper division teacher though.

I completely understand some of the other evals on here. I have no doubt he's a great mathematician, and he would probably be a great teacher for an upper-div math analysis/proofs course. As a lower-div teacher, he assumes students know too much and/or care about topics outside the scope of the course, leading him to stray away from the course syllabus. I suppose the upside is that -- the quarter I had him -- he took 90% of the midterm questions verbatim from the homework.

In short: Great mathematician. Potentially great upper-div teacher. Not-so-great lower-div teacher.

His assumption that his students will and should understand what he teaches, will make your life worse than miserable. I'm a math major, but honesty, I was simply a machine which solved the problem, without understanding head or tail of it. If you have a choice of other professors, do avoid Greene. In fact, avoid this professor at all cost, run away from him for your life