Current instructor

Laurentiu Maxim

/5Adjusted rating
/5RMP difficulty
captured reviews
About this rating

Raw average: 2.88/5 from 89 quality ratings. The adjusted rating blends this with the UW review average (3.66/5), weighted as 20 additional ratings. Smaller samples stay closer to that average. Each captured review is counted once in the prior; this does not correct who chooses to leave a review.

RMP profile ↗ · All captured review dates; profile matched by name.

What students say

Original student reviews · all captured dates

CALC222 · course not matched
Quality 3/5Difficulty 4/5
Maxim I don't think is teaching at UW-Madison moving forward from the Fall 2023 semester, but he was interesting. Sometimes hard to understand, but cared enough to make lectures entertaining.
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CALC222 · course not matched
Quality 4/5Difficulty 4/5
Seeing the reviews on here quite surprised me. He was a respectful lecturer and accommodated student needs well. Also, he was easy to understand and made good use of lecture time. There were some exceptions, as he did go on useless tangents a few times, albeit those few times were few and far between.
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CALC222 · course not matched
Quality 3/5Difficulty 5/5
READ THE ONLINE BOOK!!! Max, as he asks to be called, is hilarious and does go over lots of content in class. It will be hard to follow if you are expecting to learn from lecture, but it is very useful if you have read through the section in the book before hand. It's a hard class but if you do some pre-work you will be able to stay on top of it
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CALC222 · course not matched
Quality 3/5Difficulty 4/5
As good as a math professor can be in my opinion. He explained things alright and goes through many practice problems in class. The issues in the course lie within the exams being massive percents of your grade and extremely difficult but unfortunately they are the same regardless of who you have as a professor.
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MATH 521
Quality 1/5Difficulty 5/5
A kind of derogatory, condescending professor that probably need not be teaching students. He thinks he knows everything, and belittles students in class; playing uncomfortable jokes on them. I personally felt bad for some students who seemed to not understand the subject quite well, and he makes fun of them when asking questions in class .
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MATH 521
Quality 4/5Difficulty 5/5
Many definitions in the lecture, make sure to review all materials more than once. Also, pay attention to EVERY exercise he went through before the exam, which has high probability to show up in the exam. Also an extra credit problem in the final akin to one of the past challenging HW questions. Also available outside of classes. Overall, not bad.
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Personal experiences, not a representative survey. Profile matching and captured coverage are shown in the source details.

Classes with Laurentiu Maxim

MATH 341 introduces the theory of linear algebra with a focus on proofs, covering vector spaces, transformations, and eigenvalues.

Offering recorded · Fall 2026

Recent recorded grades — Fall 2025: 3.07 GPA, 47.6% A/AB (n=21 letter grades).

historical GPA · grades

Spring 2022–Spring 2026

MATH 751 introduces algebraic and differential topology, covering homotopy, manifolds, and homology.

Offering recorded · Fall 2026

Recent recorded grades — Fall 2014: 3.58 GPA, 73.7% A/AB (n=19 letter grades); Fall 2021: 3.13 GPA, 50.0% A/AB (n=26 letter grades); Fall 2024: 3.64 GPA, 81.8% A/AB (n=22 letter grades).

historical GPA · grades

Fall 2022–Fall 2025

Recorded teaching history

Explore courses taught by this instructor →
Browse recorded courses
TermCourseTitle
Fall 2026MATH 341Linear Algebra
Fall 2026MATH 698Directed Study
Fall 2026MATH 751Introductory Topology I
Fall 2026MATH 990Reading and Research

Teaching history may be incomplete. Course pages contain course-specific feedback and citations.

Instructor identity & provenance
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