"This is a sparse matrix, a sparse, matrix. And mathematicians... they like."
The first professor I want to tell you about is a faculty member in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. He is at least a head shorter than me and always wears tan or blue slacks, a striped dress shirt and a fleece jacket. He is Chinese and did his undergraduate and first graduate degree in China and then his second and third graduate degrees at UCLA. I only share this so you will know he has a bit of a heavy accent and is pretty much brilliant.
He makes me thankful that the whiteboard is planar because if it was multidimensional, I am sure he would write in 3D. As is, by the end of class the contents of the whiteboard make my brain explode. He never erases, has the habit of enunciating with the DryErase marker and the even worse habit of placing the marker tip on the board, starting to walk, scanning the board and finally connecting to two bits of relevant information together.
My favorite thing about Professor 1 is that while he rarely takes a breath while lecturing, seriously he talks continuously (if you really think about it this is amazing), he has moments where he gets completely sidetracked with a philosophical or serious personal thought. For instance, last week he was lecturing and made a note of a mistake made by the author of our textbook. He then pauses for a moment, a longer moment than he has all night, frowns at the screen and says, quietly and to no one in particular, "it's ok... everyone makes mistakes sometimes."
