Skip to main content
Academia

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

5
  • Is this just a verbose way of saying, "lectures help some people"?
    – Raphael
    Commented Sep 3, 2015 at 8:55
  • 9
    It's possible that most of my lecturers were "exceptionally gifted experts" (some of them were senior professors and my university is well-regarded), but personally during my mathematics degree I found that seeing people actually work through the material at a semi-plausible pace was a great help compared with static and highly-prepared text. In a textbook you don't see someone at the top of their field go "oh!" and look back through their work to find and correct a mistake! Of course there are other ways than lectures to experience this and it's not impossible to learn mathematics without it.
    – Steve Jessop
    Commented Sep 3, 2015 at 9:42
  • 7
    I wonder if I went to an excellent university for mathematics and never knew it until now, since all of my math lecturers added a lot of value. Certainly attempting to work through Baby Rudin without the lectures seems like a route to madness.
    – Todd Wilcox
    Commented Sep 3, 2015 at 12:36
  • It's been my experience during my education in engineering, both undergraduate and graduate, that the development of ideas often takes huge leaps that a person not already familiar with the material will find impossible to follow. Most of the lectures in my classes detailed those developments in ways that were easier to understand (I say most because some profs were horrible lecturers). Or the professor would demonstrate 3 or 4 different paths to the same answer vs. the 1 in the book.
    – DLS3141
    Commented Sep 3, 2015 at 14:09
  • On the other hand, one of my best classes was Heat Exchanger Design, a graduate level class that dealt with fun stuff like mixed phase flows. I was the only student and the prof just told me what book to get, gave me the homework assignments and said, "Come see me if you have any questions or when you're done so you can start the projects." The projects were the same way and the exams were all of the open book, take home variety. I talked to him maybe once a week for the whole term.
    – DLS3141
    Commented Sep 3, 2015 at 14:18