User:Alweiss

Ryan N. Alweiss
Room	M313
Year	2018
Course	Mathematics

Hello. My name is Ryan. I graduated MIT in 2018 and will be attending graduate school at Princeton University. Here are the classes I took and my personal opinions about them, as well as research I've done. The formatting is copied from Brian Chen. This page was last updated in Fall 2018.

Classes

Fall 2015

• 5.111 (van Voorhis, Shoulders): Easy GIR, not too interesting.
• 7.012 (Lander, Weinberg): Slightly less easy GIR, did not find too interest.
• 18.217 (Stanley): I enjoyed this class a lot. Stanley is retired but combinatorics is always great.
• 24.00 (Hare): I enjoyed this a lot too, but I heard it's not as good if you don't have Caspar Hare.
• 18.A34 (Shor): I liked Putnam seminar.

Spring 2016

• 18.405 (Moshkovitz): I very much enjoyed complexity theory, and it was a great class. I especially like the communication complexity parts which I hear Williams emphasizes less, but I'm sure it's still great. You can find a survey I wrote with Yang Liu on the website.
• 18.102 (Melrose): I enjoyed this class, and Melrose is a funny guy. The material is a bit dry and there are a fair number of problem sets, but overall it's good.
• 18.721 (Artin): I didn't like this class very much. Artin is old and is not as good as teaching as he used to be.
• 14.01 (forgot who taught, and didn't attend enough to find out): Silly, easy and straightforward HASS class.
• 18.099 (Csikvari): This was a special topics class. I enjoyed it, although I think I wasn't as comfortable with fourier analysis back then. I wrote a survey with Evan Chen and Sammy Luo for my final project.

Summer 2016

I attended the Duluth REU. I enjoyed it a ton and had a great time. Sammy Luo was also there.

Fall 2016

I will say that Fall 2016, and in fact the whole '16-'17 school year, was the roughest time of my life due to a personal issue. My motivation and so on to do work during this period was a lot lower, because I was constantly extremely upset. Fortunately, I survived these dark times. Probably my terrible experiences this year partly influenced my decision to graduate in 3 years.

• 18.785 (Sutherland): This class is amazing. You work extremely hard, but you get a lot out of it. Andrew Sutherland is an excellent number theorist and a teacher. I highly recommend this class.
• 18.905 (Miller): I am not a huge fan of algebraic topology, and apparently Miller's treatment is pretty nonstandard. Honestly I somewhat regret taking this and wish I had taken representation theory instead.
• 18.821 (Vogan et al): I really did not like project lab. But then again I was going through rough times and had no motivation to do this sort of drudgery. Vogan is a great guy though and it is not his fault.
• 24.253 (McGee): Somewhat interesting subject matter, but I was not at a point in my life where I had the motivation to get up at the early hour that the class was, so I pretty much never want.

Spring 2017

• 18.783 (Sutherland): Again, Andrew Sutherland is a great teacher. I liked this class a lot, though maybe a bit less than 18.785 as the material was a bit less interesting. It forced me to learn coding, which was nice.
• 18.425 (Goldwasser, Vaikuntanathan): I liked this class a lot too. Cryptography is a nice subject. There was a fair amount of tedious work involved.
• 24.09 ( Schultheis): Good class, a lot was review from 24.00. It was a low time commitment CI-H.
• 24.118 (Rayo): This was an extremely easy and low time commitment math class that I got HASS credit for. It was great. Subject material was somewhat interesting but there was not much content.
• 14.16 (Manea): This was another mathy HASS class. The subject material was more interesting than 24.118, and it wasn't as trivial as 24.118, so it was a better class overall. But again, it was another low time commitment mathy HASS class. Given how bad the first semester of my sophomore year had been (and the second semester was marginally better if at all) it was nice to get these HASS credits.

You can see the theme of this semester, killing a CI-H and two HASSes to leave soon.

Summer 2017

I attended the Emory REU where I worked with Sammy Luo. I learned a lot, but I really did not like the long computations involved in analytic number theory.

Fall 2017

• 18.S997 (Zhao): This is hands down the greatest class I've taken at MIT. Yufei is a phenomenal lecturer and I strongly recommending taking everything he teaches if you have the relevant background. He consistently gets high course evaluations. There is a strong personal bias here in that I am going into combinatorics, but even the others who took his class - and there were a few analysts, computer scientists etc. - really enjoyed it.
• 18.510 (Cohn): Henry Cohn is a great guy, and I found this class to be interesting and well-taught. I did find it rather slow, and it was the first undergraduate math class I've taken in a while and was targeted at an audience with less experience in math.
• 18.100Q (Gorin): This was an extremely low effort class for which I knew all the material that counted as a CI-M.
• 18.217 (Stanley): This was unfortunately Richard Stanley's last class. I like that you can repeat topics classes for credit.
• 21M.600 (Gammons): This was a fun and entertaining class, and it fulfilled my HASS-A.

IAP 2018

• 17.567 (Karlinsky): This was a good class. I liked it. Israel is a great country, and an interesting one also.

I also ASEd 18.03 during IAP.

Spring 2018

• 6.046 Introduction to Algorithms (Madry, Tidor, Gupta): Not terribly difficult given that I had taken things that required it before (18.405, 18.425), and explicitly tried to take the lowest work class that I could petition for a REST requirement, which at this point was my final remaining graduation requirement.

Also, I did some research with Noga Alon, Shyam Narayanan, and Yang Liu, and as well as another project with Yufei Zhao.