Teaching | Jacques Verstraete 2

I was fortunate to advise Sam Spiro (NSF Postdoc, Rutgers), Jason O’Neill (Cal State LA), Michael Tait (Villanova), Jiaxi Nie (Fudan), and Craig Timmons (Cal State Sacramento) for their recent PhD theses. I am currently accepting applications for graduate school.

The department offers numerous courses in Combinatorics. The combinatorics group designed the Math 154 and Math 158 upper division undergraduate courses, serving many Math and Math CS majors, as well as Math 184 and Math 188. We also teach year-long graduate sequences, including Algebraic Combinatorics and Probabilistic Combinatorics and Algorithms, a wide variety of topics courses, and reading courses for both graduates and undergraduates (including undergraduate research assistants). In the past I have also taught upper division Real Analysis, Number Theory, Probability and Statistics, Mathematical Reasoning, and a wide range of undergraduate courses in calculus, linear algebra and statistics.

The Department of Mathematics historically acquired CAPES to evaluate courses and instructors. The instructor approval ratings for some of the above-mentioned courses are available here. There are also some past websites for courses as follows:

Typeset course notes are available for all courses, available upon request.

Teaching Evaluations

A few student comments regarding my teaching are listed below:

I really appreciate that I learned a lot of useful knowledge and skills in your classes. Your courses mean a lot to me, and it also makes me more clear about my future development.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time in your class. Your teaching and patience during both lecture and office hours made it easy to follow along, and I learned a great deal by the end of the course. It's such a great learning experience for me.

I want to say thank you since I learned a lot in this class. The concepts and knowledge we learned in class have many applications in life, which arouses my interest in applying for MFE(Master of Financial Engineering).

I really enjoyed your way of teaching by combining examples and historical diagrams with course materials. I was able to get an insightful and thorough understanding of how fascinating math is and how fun it is to explore logic.

Your class was extremely well-designed and provided useful knowledge for students to study proficiently and succeed in exams. The material itself, to be frank, is hard for students to understand and use the knowledge to finish tasks. However, the examples you gave in class and the way you led us through every step in the solution had brought me toward success in this course. It’s no exaggeration to say that from the three years I spent in UCSD, you are the best teacher with the best teaching method.

Your class left an indelible mark on my educational path and made me more clear about my future development. I genuinely cherished your teaching and benefited immensely from your instructional guidance. I am deeply grateful for the knowledge and skills I acquired under your tutelage.

I am reaching out to you because I have greatly appreciated your teaching style and the insights I've gained from your class. Your introduction to the application of mathematics in Enumerative Combinatorics was particularly eye-opening and fascinating. Furthermore, your patient responses to my inquiries during office hours, along with your guidance on problem-solving, have been invaluable to my learning experience.