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.