Spielman was my algorithms Prof in college and legitimately one of the smartest guys in terms of raw intelligence I’ve ever met. He was a great teacher, able to

Spielman was my algorithms Prof in college and legitimately one of the smartest guys in terms of raw intelligence I’ve ever met. He was a great teacher, able to explain the most complicated of problems in language that I could intuitively understand and get excited about. Before that class I had a lot of problems with the math sides of CS (still definitely do), but he really made the subject approachable for me. I started the class getting C’s, but after visiting his office hours nearly weekly, by the end of the semester I was getting 100s on my problem sets. That class, and the way he taught it, convinced me that advanced math, whilst hard for me, is not beyond my grasp or really that of anyone. It’s just a matter of breaking problems down into manageable chunks and recognizable sub-problems, a skill at which Spielman is especially adept. I knew he was smart then (he had just received a $500k McArthur “genius” grant), but reading this article really put into perspective how effective he is and how lucky I was to have him as a professor. His same skill for breaking down problems that helped me succeed in his class seems to be the same skill that enabled him to solve this problem.