Steve Ballmer's Harvard CS50 Lecture Yesterday

Somehow much of the image I had of Ballmer was that he was shouting, throwing chairs, a buffoon, not very thoughtful, and standing on the good thinking of Gates and the rest at Microsoft.

In this lecture, he did some buffoon-like shouting but, to me, came off as insightful about himself and others, with some good insight into a lot, in education, computing, business, and life, bright, fast on his feet, surprisingly easy to like, and okay.

It appears that he mentioned Harvard's Math 55, and maybe that course was the same as the colorful description in

AMERICAN.COM

A Magazine of Ideas

Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?

By Christina Hoff Sommers From the March/April 2008 Issue

Filed under: Culture Women earn most of America’s advanced degrees but lag in the physical sciences. Beware of plans to fix the "problem."

Math 55 is advertised in the Harvard catalog as “prob­ably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is legendary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester fresh­man course meets for three hours a week, but, as the catalog says, homework for the class takes between 24 and 60 hours a week.

at one time at

http://www.american.com/archive/2008/march-april-magazine-co...

and with at least some parts of the article still at various Web sites, as from a simple Google search.

The article emphasized the challenge of Math 55 but then went on to discuss Title IX and women in STEM fields.

At one time, the main texts for Math 55 were

Halmos, Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces

Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis

Spivak, Calculus on Manifolds

Yes, that could be challenging for freshmen!

I took a course from Rudin -- not so tough, but I took it as a senior, not a freshman.

I got enough linear algebra out of undergrad courses but very much enjoyed reading Halmos later -- a favorite book. Halmos was the best writer of the bunch. And I read through Spivak.

Most difficult undergraduate course in the country? Not really! As a senior I took a reading course from Kelley, General Topology where I gave the lectures -- usually Kelley was more difficult than any of Halmos. ..., Spivak!

Just what could be so difficult about a freshman physics course, I don't know! The Feynman lectures are not too difficult but in places are not so clear. E.g., there is the place where he says that a particle we don't know about will have probability distribution uniform over all of space. No it won't! There can be no such probability distribution. Sorry 'bout that, Dick! Why? Simple exercise!

I did like Ballmer's story about wanting to major in math and/or physics and about the first test where he got a 33 which was the fifth best in the class and still a B+!

I, too, wanted to major in math and physics; on the first test in the physics class I took, there were four questions; the prof said getting any three correct would be 100; and not very many students got that. Well, I got all 4 for, I guess, 133 and didn't miss anything else for the semester.

Then I got torqued about physics for its sloppy use of math and didn't have time enough to clean up the math for the physics and also do the physics so majored in math instead.

There were some rough edges in some more Ballmer covered, but, net, he was okay and much better than I expected.