Welcome to Pavel Solin's Homepage
I am a Full Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics at the University of Nevada, Reno (visit page).
Course Materials (Spring 2025)
- Num. Anal. and Approx. II (MATH 702) syllabus, Python textbook, Python app
- Applied Functional Analysis (MATH 705) syllabus
Teaching
I believe that students do not learn efficiently by passively sitting in lectures and listening to an instructor. Also,it's naive to think that they are able to focus for 75-90 minutes, that all of them learn at the same pace, and that
when a lecture ends, students have understood and learned everything that was presented to them. In reality, they
have to re-learn most of the material later, on their own, when an instructor is not available to assist them. This
currently accepted model of higher education is called assembly line education, and it was established during
the 2nd industrial revolution (A. Levine, S. Van Pelt: The Great Upheaval: Higher Education's Past, Present, and
Uncertain Future, 2021). Indeed, students are treated more like cars on an assembly line than like individual human
beings. There exists a much better model, competency-based education (CBE), where students learn at their own
pace, one concept at a time, get a lot of practice under an instructor's supervision, and never have to tackle multiple
new concepts at once. I believe that CBE is the future of higher education, and the only model that really works.
Here are a few references on the topic of self-paced, instructor-assisted learning:
- P. Solin: Self-Paced, Instructor Assisted Approach to Teaching Linear Algebra, MCS, Vol. 15 (2021).
- P. Solin, A. Freyer: Self-Paced, Instructor Assisted Approach to Teaching Python Programming, MCS, Vol. 17 (2023).
- P. Solin: Self-Paced, Instructor Assisted Approach to Teaching SQL, submitted (2024).
- P. Solin: Self-Paced, Instructor Assisted Approach to Teaching 3D Modeling and CAD, submitted (2025).
Research
My research group develops advanced computational methods for multi-scale multi-physics problemsin civil, nuclear, electrical, and mechanical engineering. I am especially interested in monolithic
higher-order adaptive discretizations of time-dependent problems. Visit my research group.
Books
