ProfessorJacobsen

ProfessorJacobsen is the newest member of the MathDepartment. Commonly known as "Prof Jakes" (because Jacobsen is too long?), he has also been called "Prof Math" and "Oh Man!" in his illustrious career at Mudd. He teaches BigFourier, PDEs, and core. He is impressively good at making BigFourier interesting at 9 in the morning, and has a tendency to use lots of computer-plotted graphs and animations in his lectures.

Prof. Jacobsen is one of the best teachers I've ever had as well as being one of the nicest guys I've ever met. He's one of the only professors around that I truly feel I can talk with on a guy to guy level without making me feel uncomfortable or stupid because he has superior knowledge or intelligence. Due to him, I actually understood, and daresay I, liked, DE's II. He sometimes has a habit of becoming so enthralled in the theory that he skips over the details of how to actually solve the problems, but he's still awesome. He's a real dead head (he likes the Grateful Dead as well as other awesome bands from the past, like Yes) and a cool guy all around! -NickHerman

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Jacobsen Quotes

• Zen Jacobsen: "The slope isn't positive or negative; it just is."
• "How can you guys not know that that's Jerry Garcia??"
• "In love, you can't be so careful all the time--you gotta take risks! That's what we learn from DE's."
• "So assume Frodo throws out an epsilon..."
• "So you may remember that part in Lord of the Rings where Frodo says 'I wish I'd never seen any of these epsilons Gandalf! I wish none of this had ever happened!' And, as you probably know, Gandalf replies 'So do I Frodo, but that is not for you or me to change. It is simply for us to decide what to do with the epsilons given to us.' "
• "As k gets close to infinity k-1 basically equals k. It's like if you got a $1 scholarship to Harvey Mudd, right?"
• "Well, remember, we chose N > 1/epsilon, so if you do a Kerry--that is, a flip-flop--you can see that epsilon > 1/N."
• Student: "Let's use x instead, so we don't have 2 gammas that mean different things..." Jacobsen: "No! I have tenure now!"