Troels Jorgensen

Doctor Troels Jorgensen is an aptly named man. Stout and round with a wisp of brown hair on his potato-head, a genuinely jolly grin, and a befuddled Scandanavian accent, Troels would be better garbed in overalls and a pointed cap than the drab attire of a mathematician. Well, most mathematicians. However, this great Dane specializes in hyperbolic geometry — a surprisingly antiquated non-Euclidean pursuit that places Troels with the likes of Escher, Lovecraft, and Hegel's grandson-in-law.

But don't get your hopes up, because you're most likely to find Troels teaching you a decidedly un-exotic course in calculus. Or rather, not teaching you calculus, for which Troels is famous. He likes to skip the parts of the textbook that are unnecessary unless you want to take more math classes. Or his final. But, hey, that's only at the end of the semester, and you shouldn't let it take away from the good stuff. To Troels, calculus is like an old friend — he likes to goof around with it, take a few derivates, have a few laughs. Certainly nothing that would require breaking a sweat—or taking a test.

(Bewildered student: "Professor Jorgensen, I didn't get anything wrong on the midterm, but you took 15 points off."

Troels: "Ha! This is the midterm. The midterm. I never look at it again!")

Of course, that means that the final counts for everything—so don't forget the most important part.

"Can we eat during the final?"

Phrased in Achille Varzi's northern Italian lilt, even his true linguistic love—the language of logic—sounds sweet. Which is high praise considering that, as a language, symbolic logic lacks everything that one would want to listen to: tone, style, personality and, well, humanity.

Take the statement "Every student who takes symbolic logic finds to be comically absurd." Varzi would tell you that what you really mean is something more like: "Every x is such that, if x is a student and x takes Symbolic Logic, then x finds Symbolic Logic to be comically absurd." See how much more sense things make when you use universal quantifiers and predicate all your variables? No? Perhaps that's because you are entirely illiterate in Logic. That sentence is written:

∀x((S(x) ∧ K(x,j)) → L(x,j)).

After you learn how to complicate (and illuminate!) things further with world-models and domain-restricting clauses, you may be able to apply your new language to real-life problems. Take the word "homological." A word is "homologocial" if it describes itself, like "short," "bombastic" and "sesquapadalian." It is "heterological" if it does not. So is "heterological" heterological? If it is, then it does describe itself and is therefore not heterological. So the word itself is absurd!

A logician like Varzi can use his language to find meaningful and fun answers to such paradoxes. And rumor has it that in the even-more exciting sequel, Modal Logic, he writes symbolic-stanzas of predicate poetry.

—Alex Statman

Carl Hart

Carl Hart begins each class of "Drugs and Behavior" with the sounds of Bob Marley. He has, I assume, the longest dreadlocks of any Columbia professor. And theories abound regarding the remarkable length of his fingernails. He either a) uses them to break up cocaine ("but isn't that just the pinky?"), b) plays classical guitar ("wouldn't that be for only one hand?"), or c) does some weird sexual thing ("ouch!").

The course is heavier on the drugs than the behavior. After a four-week intro to neuroscience and federal drug policy, it's roughly divided into sections on different psychoactive drugs. Hart seems particularly interested in studying unfamiliar on- and off-label uses for the amphetamine-like drug modafinil, as well as the (false) hype surrounding the so-called meth crisis in America, which he calls "the media's drug du jour." The one fact that gets him truly stirred up, however, is the astronomical sum the government spends every year on its war on the stuff that makes Carman smell funky.

Jokes about Hart wanting to teach "Drugs and Behavior" during the 9:10-10:25 a.m. spot so that students can wake-and-bake are only true for some. His lectures are dead dense but spotted with some truly hysterical film clips and two or three captivating guests. His tests comprise his favorite asides from class and nitpicky specifics from the textbook he co-authored. Beware (but do not fear) the killah curve.

I should say that Hart opened and closed the class with two versions of the same proviso. To paraphrase: "I'm not trying to make you take drugs or not take drugs." Grilling Professor Hart about his personal experiences with the substances he discusses, I assume, just isn't done.

—Jessica Cohen

Adam Cannon

If you must take computer science, do it in a setting where you can at least focus on the teacher rather than trying to subtly check your email. With Adam Cannon, winner of Ivygate blog's first annual professorial hotness contest, you may not have much of a choice.

Which isn't to say the class is easy, or even all that fun. Cannon teaches the introductory comp sci courses, where you learn the difference between a bit and a byte, and what a CPU is. It's also where you learn that, even though it's called 'Introduction to Computers,' you still have to program, and you still, unbelievably, have to do math—without calculators.

But that's okay, Cannon's going to get you through it. "Don't worry," he tells you, looking dreamy but a little sad and tired, "You're going to hate me for a while, but you know what? We're going to do this — together."

And you do. He talks slowly, and makes sure everyone's keeping up, and writes the layers of the Internet Protocol three or four times, just to bring the point home.

"You know, when I was your age, we didn't have the Internet." He pauses and looks down. "We didn't have legs either, we had stumps."

—Brendan Ballou

Janet Conrad

"Physics for Poets" sounds like a fourth course for second semester seniors, or first-years with prematurely limited ambitions. Or, maybe it's a comically dated holdover from Columbia's '68 tumult, when we were liberated from the oppressive separation of the soft arts and the hard sciences, when we started to feel the truth of the laws of nature real deep, man. It's certainly not the sort of course one expects to inspire devotion from the professor consigned to teach it. That's not the case with Janet Conrad. "I teach Physics for Poets as a mission," she declared a few minutes into our conversation. Conrad is a cheery redhead with a Ph.D. in "High Energy Physics" and a love for neutrinos. (See her web page for more information about neutrinos, as well as a variety of snapshots of Conrad posing with reactor paraphernalia). And Conrad is serious — serious enough to trek all the way from her lab in Chicago weekly to teach a course designed for people who may never crack a physics book again.

The job may seem thankless, but Conrad likes the challenge of walking English majors though the labyrinth of relativity and quantum phenomena. "These students can take any class they want for their science requirement, but they decided to take a risk on taking physics because they're interested in the ideas," she said. She has envisioned the class as a yearlong course, though the first semester functions as a standalone survey of major concepts in physics, while the second half is spent delving into deeper issues by "riffing" (her word) on a few specific topics. And the "poetry" in the title isn't a cutesy way of saying dumbed down physics. Students can replace a quiz with a short essay on a variety of topics, including poem analysis. "Updike wrote a surprising number of poems on physics," Conrad informs me. "The poetry essays are my favorite to read, but I hate grading them. They're all so good."

—Alec Turnbull

For Don Hood, understanding science is a lot like reading Hegel. No, science is not obscurantist gibberish, but it does take a lot of introductory reading before you can get to the good stuff. Hood's an old hand at explaining deep scientific truths to staunch liberal arts majors-to-be, having taught the popular class Physiological Psychology (now known as Mind, Brain, and Behavior) for much of his 39-year Columbia career. Now he has vaulted to the top of the explainer totem pole, exposing himself to the ire of the first-year hordes as he takes a turn at the helm of Frontiers of Science.

Hood possesses less of the mad-scientist mystique than predecessors David Helfand and Darcy Kelley. With his neatly combed hair, tucked-in polo and winning smile, he looks more suited to the golf course than the lab. But don't let this relative external blandness fool you: Hood is a character in his own right. He is a one-man myth-buster, excited about debunking those popular theories the layman has internalized. Think you use only ten-percent of your brain? Hood is ready to disabuse you of that notion.

He might grade students' papers to the eighth of a point, but he's also a great teacher—the winner of the trifecta of Columbia teaching awards—who is fully invested in the future of Frontiers. "Science is constantly changing," says Hood, and so will the beleaguered freshman survey course. His new vision for the class includes coursework based on actual content, in addition to concepts. "People are busy, they've got other demands. We want them to come to the lecture, and if we do, we have to test them." Well...there goes your easy A.