Alcalde readers vote Inderjit Dhillon 2015 favorite teacher

Inderjit Dhillon, director of the ICES Center for Big Data Analytics, garnered a winning number of votes from alumni to win the Texas Exes' Association magazine's "Texas 10" teaching award.

This year marks the fourth time the Alcalde has asked alumni their favorite UT professors for a teaching award, the Texas 10.

"Honorifics like 'unforgettable,' 'inspiring,' and 'life-changing' popped up again and again," the editors wrote. "Winnowing down more than 200 faculty members to a group of 10, we marveled at how...one thing unites them: They really, really love their jobs. As we spoke with these master teachers, their zeal was so contagious that we left the interviews feeling unusually excited about computer science, or opera singing, or American history. That infectious enthusiasm isn’t the only ingredient in the making of a great teacher, but it’s one of the keys. Here’s hoping that their stories remind us all to go about our work with gusto."

At UT, Dhillon says he works to teach not only the science but also the art of computers, to give students a big-picture view of the field that will outlast ever-changing programming languages and hardware. The ability to move between a kind of mathematical intuition—a sense of the program and how it works—and the formal math that makes it work is “a good place to start,” he says.

I think...I’m actually able to instill in (students) confidence,” Dhillon says. “So that they can go ahead and learn new things for themselves.”

The full article appears in the May/June issue and online.