What makes this the hottest class at MIT? - The Boston Globe

MIT loves numbers, so let me drop a few to illustrate the popularity of a course called 6.036. It is overseen by four instructors and 15 teaching assistants. Lectures are held in 26-100, the school's largest auditorium, with 566 seats. But this semester, about 700 students signed up for the course -- also known as Introduction to Machine Learning -- according to Tommi Jaakkola, the computer science professor who created it. So at the first lecture, more than 100 students watched on a video screen in an overflow room.