George is a fantastic teacher with very attractive lectures.
I think his secret sauces include the following:
- Look at everything from different views: Zoe (ζωή, big picture) versus Bios (βίος, details).
- Selectively focus on the most important techniques and examples, ignoring unnecessary points.
Students can feel that they learned a lot without remembering too much boring concepts.
- Have his own methodologies on creative process.
Students can experience those "Aha" times when following his introduction.
The trade-offs may be as follows: (very biased personal view, don't take it serious)
- (+) Attending lectures is always pleasant.
- (+) Students can learn things quickly and apply to his own research.
- (-) His lectures may give the false image that creating things is as easy as the fusion of ideas.
This is not true because one must have a broad view to know what to borrow,
and there are boring times such as trials and errors,
non-trivial adoptation and modification of existing methods.
He omitted these in his lecture.
I would strongly recommend everyone interested in networking try his 216 and 219.
In this post I won't put all Bia unless interesting.
Using those well-defined mathematical terms,
Zoai are quite easy to state and thus very short.