It's obvious shiva is not properly planning out his lectures beforehand because his thoughts are scattered and difficult to follow. That being said, abstract algebra can just be extremely unintuitive at times. Biggest complaint is homework is graded unnecessarily harshly. Textbook is really good and it saved me on homework/exams.Rate My Professors ↗
Historical instructor
SHIVA CHIDAMBARAM
What students say
Original student reviews · all captured dates
Quality 3/5Difficulty 4/5
Quality 3/5Difficulty 4/5
Will read from the book. Is a nice guy and definitely has potential as a teacher, but for now seems to just copy the textbook. Occasionally gets a little confused and has to redo a lot of work. Hardest exams I have ever seen, but he will lower the grade cutoffs significantly at the end. Will go over at the end of class. Again, really nice guy.Rate My Professors ↗
Quality 3/5Difficulty 4/5
Just walked in, read the slides out, underlined words on slides and walked out. Because it was his first time teaching the course, he seemed nervous and wouldn't really say anything when people disturbed class, that grace could be given to him. But overall, even if u attend lecture, you'll have to teach the material to yourselfRate My Professors ↗
Quality 1/5Difficulty 4/5
Calc 2 is an inherently hard class and shiva only made it harder for me. The only reason I passed was because of TA doing gods work lemme tell you. I took it in the fall and all of the freshman in the class would just talk over him the entire time. Along with allowing himself to be treated like a door matt his lectures were hard to understand.Rate My Professors ↗
Quality 4/5Difficulty 3/5
Lowkey he is chill and gives good examples, but it was kind of hard to understand him sometimes because the examples were not really related to things we did in discussion.Rate My Professors ↗
Quality 1/5Difficulty 5/5
Shiva's lectures were extremely hard to follow and understand, and he spent a lot of time doing proofs rather than clear examples. The class felt like I had to teach it to myself with him as my professor.Rate My Professors ↗
Personal experiences, not a representative survey. Profile matching and captured coverage are shown in the source details.
Classes with SHIVA CHIDAMBARAM
MATH 541
Modern Algebra 1
3 creditsMATH 541 Modern Algebra 1 covers groups, rings, ideals, homomorphisms, and abstract vector spaces.
No offering record · Spring 2026
with this instructor · course overall, matching historical terms
historical GPA · grades
Fall 2021–Spring 2026Recorded teaching history
Distinct courses recorded per term
Explore courses taught by this instructor →Browse recorded courses
| Term | Course | Title |
|---|---|---|
| Spring 2026 | MATH 541 | Modern Algebra 1 |
| Fall 2025 | MATH 222 | Calculus and Analytic Geometry 2 |
| Fall 2025 | MATH 390 | Undergraduate Research with Madison Experimental Mathematics Lab |
| Spring 2025 | MATH 390 | Undergraduate Research with Madison Experimental Mathematics Lab |
| Spring 2025 | MATH 467 | Introduction to Number Theory |
| Fall 2024 | MATH 320 | Linear Algebra and Differential Equations |
| Fall 2024 | MATH 467 | Introduction to Number Theory |
Teaching history may be incomplete. Course pages contain course-specific feedback and citations.
Instructor identity & provenance
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