Dennis Schneider

Dennis Murray Schneider is an intimidating mind, and an intimidating professor. If you can keep up, he is an excellent one. If you understand that he is extremely concerned with making sure that you learn and understand the material, and that this is his ultimate goal and is of utmost importance to him, you see that he is a very good professor with just a slightly different teaching style than you are used to.

He rules the classroom with an iron tongue-in-cheek, but is kind and personable outside it. Prof. Schneider was well known for his chain smoking earlier in his long Knox tenure, but has quit, or at least switched to nicotine gum. You can tell that you have said something extraordinarily stupid in his class when he immediately gets out another piece.

D.M.S. (don't call him D.M.S. to his face) helps write Mathematica and has for many years. He is very proud of this, or at least Mathematica itself, so tread carefully when badmouthing the program in his presence. He hates graphic calculators and similar.

Prof. Schneider wrote a book on Linear Algebra in the '80s. It's a good book despite its horrendous cover. If you can find it (I think they still have a copy in SMC Lib), check it out. I guess you could buy it online? http://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/0024768103

D.M.S. seems tough, but that's cause he used to be a bad seed, all such as hanging out in pool halls in Detroit, where he grew up.

Class Rules

• "I don't have a syllabus. I speak, you write it down."
• "I come on time, you come on time."
• "I'm here for the duration, you're here for the duration."
• "I come prepared, you come prepared."
• "You have math homework every night."

Classic D.M.S. quotes independent of time

If you've had Schneider for class, you're heard these:

• "It's like we say back in Dee-troit..."
• <graphic sounds of sniffing> "... I smell a theorem!"
• "It's a Pavlovian reaction." <jerks his knee>
• "Mathematics transcends religion and says, 'By God it's true!'"
• "It's Miller time!"
• "Vite vite!" (translates to "quick quick!")
• "Memorize! Memorize! Memorize!"
• "It AINT got no derivative!"
• "Man, Alzheimers is rampin' amongst youngsters these days.."
• "Like Moses said on his tablet, Thou Shalt Not Divide by Zero.."
• "50 times before bed!"
• "Go home, take one foot, and bring it down hard onto the other!"
• "If you want to be suave and sophisticated at party on Friday night.." (About using the word hyperplane)
• "...that's a seventy-five-cent word for..."

D.M.S. quotes

• "This is a volume problem, these are your friends from the old neighborhood."
• "You learned Trig in preschool; Algebra was prenatal care. You were solving the quadratic formula in your mother's womb!"
• "Don't be so hooty tooty, err, hoity toity."
• "None of you could ever be President...you're all too smart!"
• "You don't know what the dot product is? Don't apologize to me, apologize to your mother for being such a disappointment."

Ph.D. Thesis

Sufficient Sets for some Spaces of Entire Functions PDF on JSTOR