Memorable college courses

In My Humble Opinion
41

One of my favorite courses was an undergrad computer science requirement with the totally unpromising name of “Numerical Methods”

Day one of that course, the sharp-eyed aging professor dove into the subject with zeal, giving us two examples of the course material in real life application.

The first example was discussing Rutgers’ entry in the America’s Cup yacht race. He gave about a fifteen minute talk on the methods used to model the hull and the water acting on it. This might sound dry as dust to many, but in the telling it was absolutely fascinating.

The second example was that of the convict who donated his body to science to be sliced and imaged–they froze his body solid and then sliced him into wafer-thin slivers from head to toe, photographing the exposed body internals as each slice was shaved off the frozen corpse.
They then used complex software to convert the many thousands of photos of slices into a 3D model of the human body. Again, his excitement with the subject matter made it thoroughly gripping.

And every part of the course retained that sense of excitement.

I remember the last question on the final exam, for extra credit, asked to sum up in a few words what we learned in the course. I said something like “even if you have inadequate fuzzy data, by increasing the number of samples you can use numerical methods to produce more accurate results” or somesuch. I remember a glowing note in red from him next to that response that gave me full credit and told me he was happy that I understood what the course was about.

42

“Optical Signal Processing and Introductory Holography.”

It turns out you can use light to carry out extremely complex mathematical calculations in the spatial domain (convolutions, Fourier transforms, autocorrelations, etc.) extremely quickly, i.e. as quickly as light can travel from point A to point B.

A large part of this class was dedicated to understanding why you could use light like this, and how these calculations work. The math was hideous: it was mostly two-dimensional integrals involving a lot of sines, cosines, exponents, and phase angles, and you had to know a lot of algebraic/trigonometric identities to be able to boil these equations down to something that didn’t use up an entire pencil’s worth of lead. The prof was a mad-scientist-looking dude who spent most of his time with his back to the class, violently scribbling these gigantic formulas in chalk across a forty-foot blackboard, sometimes requiring one or two carriage returns to render the entire formula.

The other part was about understanding the math behind why a hologram works. It started with a mathematical description of coherent waves of light propagating outward from a point source, figured in the interference from a separate planar wave of coherent laser light, and described what pattern those two interfering waves would produce on the target film. And then there was the math to go the other way, showing how when you later illuminated that film with planar coherent laser light, the resulting wave front was the same as what you’d get from a point source of light in the same X,Y,Z position (relative to the film) as that original source. The math wasn’t much easier than the earlier optical signal processing stuff.

43

I love that energy. I love when you have a professor who is so thoroughly immersed in their passion for their work it makes everything you learn so much more interesting.

44

You think the calculations for holography with coherent light are bad, try doing them with partially coherent light. Autocorrelation function? Van Cittert-Zernike Theorem? Aaaaugh!

45

Another memorable class for me was Comparative Religion. I think it was a 300 level course intended for anthropology majors, but I recall there were two holy-roller Christian types that were not anthropology students who took the course for some unknown reason and those two students were what made this class so memorable. Comparative religion courses, are intended to study the basic tenets of the various major world religions along with the development of shared and different religious doctrines, and the cultural impacts associated with those religions as they spread. What comparative religion courses do NOT do is proceed from the premise that one religion is the ‘correct’ one and here’s how all the others fall short by comparison. This, unfortunately, was exactly how these two wanted to treat it, as was evident from virtually every class discussion. I think the prof may have been too indulgent at first with these two in allowing them to express their Christian-centric opinions without challenge. Because later on they were quite disruptive to class discussions, offering condemnations at practically every turn any time a ‘false religion’ or ‘false prophet’ was mentioned during lectures (being sure to cite the Bible chapter and verse ‘proving’ those religions were false). It was entertaining maybe the first couple times, but after a while when people started calling them out in class "look, we get it you subscribe to Christianity here, but we’re trying to learn about other belief systems here, kids, and you’re not doing a thing to convince anyone that you’re “right” about anything by citing the Bible as authority.’ :roll_eyes:

46

The course that changed my life. I was a chem major and, for reasons, having taken one year of calculus (and one term of analytic geometry as a pre-req) I signed up for a supposedly undergrad course in modern algebra. I found it absolutely fascinating. By the end of the year I was a math major. I stayed in contact with the professor for most of my life. I stayed in the general area of modern (or abstract) algebra my whole life. But one interesting observation is that when I taught graduate algebra courses, it was hard to cover all the material that were covered in that supposedly introductory undergrad course.

47

I used it at MIT also, in the early days of it, but I was in grad school in Louisiana where it was our main system for the CS department. The Honeywell people (who bought it from GE) were frequent visitors.
My first term freshman year I took a programming linguistics class, all about Lambda expressions, where the assignments were on Multics.

48

As I’m sure you know, students at MIT tend to yell out comments to the movies they show on campus (no doubt plenty of othrers do this, too). We were watching Logan’s Run, and when, at the end, the computer systems explode in a blaze of glory, someone shouted out

MULTICS IS DOWN!!

49

Since I’m a mathematician, many of my math courses were memorable to me: There was the undergrad algebra course that didn’t have a textbook, but the professor essentially dictated a book to us, complete with chapter and section numbers; at the end, I had a notebook that looked like a textbook manuscript. In grad school, even while we were working on our research, we had to sign up for advanced courses, I think for the school’s bookkeepers to justify counting us as full-time students and to pay the faculty; in one class I was often the only student sitting listening to the prof lecture, and I think he would have come in and lecture even if nobody was there.

But I particularly remember some non-math courses, including two while I was an undergrad at MIT. One was a history course on early medieval Europe. The prof loved comparing MIT to a monastery, and took us on a field trip to a real modern monastery just outside Boston. Another I particularly enjoyed was a philosophy course on the philosophy of mind, taught by Ned Block. One of the papers I wrote he particularly liked and asked if he could keep a copy to share with future classes—it directly argued against one of his favorite ideas (qualia, if I remember correctly).

50

Trigger warnings, suicide and child sexual abuse, this post is going to go places I didn’t expect.

One of my most interesting college classes was a history class called something like “The City and the Ghetto” taught by the (at the time) somewhat famous Professor Tom Philpott. It was a small class of about 20 people, and the first month or so was incredibly interesting, because Dr. Philpott was a fantastic teacher.

I was not particularly interested in the topic, and took the course purely to because he was the professor, and it fulfilled a history requirement. I was not at all disappointed.

Then one day he didn’t show up for class. If you read the first line of this post, you can probably guess what happened. I don’t remember if somebody eventually came in and told us, or if we didn’t find out until the next class session.

The department decided that a different professor would teach each chapter of the book (or something), to finish out the year. That also was very interesting, and in retrospect a great way to teach a class, because different well thought out views about the same topic were enlightening.

I hope you’re still with me here. That was about the end of my original post, then I wanted to post a link to a bio or obit or something for him. And then I found the plot twists.

Here is a very long Texas Monthly article written about him before his death. I did not realize he was a crusader against child sexual trafficking, and particularly shown by his involvement with the 1981 movie Boys for Sale.

I also didn’t know that he had been shot prior to the time that killed him. Supposedly two intruders broke into his home, and shot him with his own gun. The police never really investigated, because he refused to take a lie detector test. We know those are bullshit, but it was enough for the police to (probably) decide it was self inflicted, and either a failed suicide attempt, or just to get attention.

Then, in 1991 when I was in his class, he (supposedly) committed suicide by shooting himself. He did suffer from bipolar disorder. Supposedly there was very little investigation into his death.

Combine what was (very probably) suicide with his anti child sex trafficking activism, and all of the sudden he has been resurrected as a “victim” of pizzagate. Killed to keep quite, lack of investigation means high level cover-up, etc.

So I thought I just had a tragic story about a professor who had interesting and insightful things to say about the immigrant experience in Chicago in the late 19th century, and then find he is still being talked about in the dark qorners of the internet in the same breath as Jeffrey Epstein.

51

Hmm, I wasn’t a very serious student, so the ones that stick out in my mind are probably for the wrong reasons.

First, there was a class on Greek roots of science words. All we had to do was learn about twenty Greek roots a week and be able to pick them out of the words from the vocabulary list we were given. An example might be Cephalalgia: cephal=head, algia=pain, so cephalalgia means a headache. It was an easy B (I said I wasn’t too serious).

There was the political science class. My roommate had it as a night class, so he filled me in on the test which he always took the night before my day class took it. Also, a sweet female friend of mine was in my class. Once a week, I’d borrow her notes and photocopy them at the library for a nickel a page. For ten weeks I usually only showed up on test days. I got an A in the class. Girlfriend got a B.

52

My degree is for special effects and animation. I had lots of enjoyable art, sculpture, and 3D modeling classes. Scriptwriting and storytelling was great. Nothing is more memorable than my Sci-Fi Cinema course. The same professor, who reviewed movies for the San Jose Mercury News, had previously taught my required general cinema class, which was also great.

The sci-fi focus taught me to expand what I thought of science fiction, and to be able to analyze it. He show clips of a bunch of films, then a full movie. I got to see things like Luc Besson’s first feature - the black & white, nearly dialog-free La Dernier Combat, and Thomas in Love, told entirely through video call conversations where the titular Thomas is never seen on screen.

I assume the guy went gaga over more recent hard sci-fi, mundane near-future stuff like Robot & Frank and Her, or even splashier fare like Arrival.

Incidentally, the two classes forced me to learn how to take extensive notes in the dark without looking, sometimes while reading subtitles. It’s a skill in proud of that has exactly zero real-world application.

53

It was written by Joan K. Hughes. It’s the 2nd edition, copyright 1979.

54

As an undergrad, I worked for the audio-visual services department and part of my job was to show slides and movies for classes. (This was the 70s, so we were using good old-fashioned 35 mm and glass lantern slides.) I did quite a few film study courses, some with quite notable instructors, and I enjoyed them immensely. But…

I also projected for classes at the art museum(s). In fact, I did “Buddhist Iconography” three times and “German Expressionism” four times. Both were 300 level courses and taught by some rather elderly and very smart/competent/awesome professors. From just those classes, I found I could have frighteningly “real” discussions with fine arts majors and even graduate students at the parties and functions I attended. The material has stuck with me for all these years. I get a lot of, “Wait…isn’t your degree in BLANK?” when I start expounding on some aspect of iconography or comparing the expressionists.

55

People didn’t do that as much when I went to LSC movies, though when we saw “That Cold Day in the Park” which had a harmonica involved in a hot scene, someone brought one and tooted it just at the right time.
Comments were limited to “Fritz sucks” before Roadrunner cartoons.
And when I was there, Multics was always down.

56

During the 1998 / 1999 academic year, I was a freshman at the University of Toronto, enrolled in humanities and planning to major in Classics. There was a requirement to take two courses from outside humanities. In that year, I took the first of those, formally a “science” course. But what it was really was a “first year seminar”, It was called “Aspects of Color”. It was really a class about just that, color, and was taught by a clever old professor from the chemistry department. As I recall, the course did deal with scientific aspects of color, but also about philosophical and psychological aspects. And it was interactive between the professor and the students.

During the year, I think we had to turn in three papers. The first one had the following requirement: you are writing an entry for an encyclopedia of color about the color “puce”. That was it. Pretty much no one had ever heard about “puce” before. My interest piqued, I went both to the library, where I looked up several books about color, and on the Internet (which at the time was still something of a novelty to me, I would have used AltaVista and not Google), and found whatever I could about this color. By the way, this is puce, a brownish-purple. Apparently, a minority of people associate it with an olive or yellowy green, perhaps due to the similarity with “puke”. There was just enough information out there for me to write an encyclopedia entry. I mentioned one or two references to puce online and in literature and got a high mark. It was possibly the easiest paper I had to write in in my entire university career, certainly one of the most entertaining…yet most of my other colleagues weren’t able to find any references to puce! The professor took pity on them and allowed them to choose a different shade to write about. I suppose I should cut them some slack. Not everyone comes to university with developed research skills.

57

I majored in Film & Communications, though I declared that one year before it was phased out in favor of “Cultural Studies.” With two English universities in Montreal, mine decide to leave the technical actual filmmaking to the other, and we’d focus on cultural theory. So as for making stuff, I had a video production class and a class in Independent Film, which wasn’t, despite my taking the class in 1993-1994, about the American indie boom, but rather was about the likes of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Kenneth Anger.

I also took a class in the Horror Film, which was pretty awesome. Early morning screenings of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Carrie. We also watched Peeping Tom, which at that time was pretty impossible to track down, and as I was a big Scorsese adherent at the time, was essential viewing for me.

58

I really enjoyed taking limnology (study of lakes, rivers, ponds, streams - basically oceanography for inland waters. The field trips were great, including Castle Lake and Lake Tahoe. We also were taught the proper way to cook and eat crawdads.