Attendance was non-mandatory because the lectures were recorded due to pandemic. It does take some time before they are uploaded though. The lectures are very theory heavy. The math involved relates to mostly matrix and linear algebra (mas3105) and a little bit of calculus 3 (mac2313) even though those classes are not prerequisites. This was wang’s first semester teaching this class. I imagine it can only get better from here.

Attending lectures makes the assignments easier. If he ever teaches it in person, attendance is definitely mandatory. I would also imagine knowing Python beforehand would be helpful rather than trying to learn it at the same time, but Python is rather easy to pick up.