<p>have you had any professors that you just walked into the class and thought "omg! i am getting taught by ____ the nobel/pulitzer/bok prize-winning author/historian/journalist/chemist/biologist etc!" i heard that james mcpherson taught for some time @ princeton. thanks to all who respond.</p>
<p>Oh yes!</p>
<p>Tragically two of the eminent professors I loved the most (Stephen Jay Gould and Judge A. Leon Higginbotham) passed away shortly after I took their classes. It was just like you describe. Judge Higginbotham in particular became a personal hero to me.</p>
<p>Larry Tribe blew my mind, too, and every single day I was like, "Unbelievable, this is MY class and he's MY teacher." I had him in law school, but he'll be teaching undergrads as well starting next year.</p>
<p>Yes, that's definitely the case. </p>
<p>I took a class first semester freshman year with Harvey Mansfield, which had about 40 students in it. Last semester, my favorite classes were taught by author Jamaica Kincaid and Middle East scholar Michael Oren, about 10 students and 50 students respectively.</p>
<p>What did Jamaica Kincaid teach?</p>
<p>She teaches several courses including creative writing, a class on Thomas Jefferson, Caribbean Women Writers (which I took), and a new class on travel literature.</p>
<p>I hear Michael Sandel teaches at Harvard - Justice or something like that.
Sandel is awesome; he's known for critiquing Rawl's concept of the "veil of ignorance" and the stable subject which Rawls presumes.</p>
<p>Anyone had a highly accomplished math teacher, Noam Elkies or other famous researchers/putnam winners etc? How were there classes? On that note, how are Math 25 or 55 if anyone's had them?</p>
<p>Ooh, I played a composition by Elkies at some concert this year. (He's a pianist and composer also.) He came and coached us. He's fantastic.</p>
<p>He does teach undergraduates too, I think. I'm not a math concentrator, though, so I couldn't tell you what that's like.</p>
<p>The people I know who took Math 25 or 55 really seemed to enjoy them, even if it seemed to take over their lives. I hear they're both fairly intense courses, but worthwhile.</p>
<p>I never took a class with Elkies either, but he is amazingly down-to-earth and interested in what undergraduates are up to, particularly musically. Once my a cappella group was rehearsing in a ground-floor room with the window open, and he stuck his head in the window to tell us how good our chords sounded and ask which group we were!</p>
<p>He works out in the college gym, too. He can whistle and sing at the same time, and he'll whistle/hum Bach counterpoint while he works out. Interesting guy.</p>
<p>My psychology professor last semester was explaining a really, really important theory that came up again and again in our text book, and then I realized that the fact that the theory's name and my professor's name were the same was not coincidental--it was his super important theory!</p>
<p>Took a course first semester taught by the provost, Steve Hyman. He's the former head of NIMH. The class was on antidepressants and stimulants, and had like 20 people in it... was crazy.</p>
<p>Sunglasses-Pinker?</p>
<p>It is really an amazing experience. It is not also as if these professors are cocky; in fact, they're really down to earth!</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Life Sciences 1a is team-taught by Erin K. O'Shea, Andrew Murray, David Liu, Robert Lue and Daniel Kahne. They're all accomplished researchers and professors in their own right. For example, Andrew Murray discovered how the cell cycle worked and David Liu, as an undergraduate here, produced a PhD-worthy thesis.</p></li>
<li><p>Chemistry 7: James Anderson, our professor, discovered how the ozone hole is created through a combination of reaction mechanisms through measurements. Ridiculous.</p></li>
<li><p>Freshman Seminar 43w: Sun-joo Kim, our professor, made some significant strides in the area of East Asian History and is regarded as one of the pre-eminent scholars in pre-modern Korean history and her name appears everywhere in journal publications in East Asian History.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Next year, I am looking forward to Chemistry 17/27, with Eric Jacobsen and Gregory Verdine, respectively, who are absolutely amazing and accomplished researchers in their fields. It also doesn't hurt that they're known to be amazing lecturers as well.</p>
<p>In the fall I will be taking Physics 16 with Howard Georgi, one of the main creators of grand unification theory. I met him during prefrosh, and he is very down to earth and interested in undergrads.</p>
<br>
<p>he is very down to earth and interested in undergrads.</p>
<br>
<p>That's putting it mildly. He's also master of Leverett House. A quick story about him:</p>
<p>He took the job as master during the summer after my junior year. That summer, I was living off campus and working as a tour guide. At least once a week, I'd have my afternoon tour group by the Science Center, and this bearded guy I'd never seen before would zoom by on a bicycle and wave and yell, "HEY THERE, HANNA!" I had no idea who he was, or how he knew who I was, and I didn't know how to explain this crazy stranger to the tour group.</p>
<p>When I moved back into Leverett in the fall, come to find out, he's my new house master! As soon as he was appointed, he had MEMORIZED the house facebook (~400 kids), and he was just greeting me in the yard all summer as he greeted every Leverett student he saw.</p>
<p>I absolutely love Niall Ferguson...he's AMAZING and it was wonderful to take a class from him. I may try to audit another next year...:)</p>