Fernando Al Assal

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Teaching

I like teaching math in different contexts and trying to help students to flourish and enjoy it. I have taught calculus classes at Yale, namely Single Variable Calculus I (Math 112), as well as Multivariable Calculus (Math 120) two times. In addition, I have also taught Introduction to College Mathematics (a University of New Haven class coded Math 1107) at the MacDougal-Walker CI via the Yale Prison Education Initiative. Finally, I have taught a summer class introducing high school students to hyperbolic geometry in an elementary fashion, via EduExplora.

In the Fall 2025 semester I am teaching two sections of Precalculus (Math 114) at UW-Madison, which I also have taught in the 2024-2025 academic year.

Research mentoring

In the 2023 Summer Mathematics Research at Yale program, I have co-mentored with Taylor McAdam five undergraduate students on a project to compute saddle connections of the double heptagon flat surface. Two years later we posted our article on the Arxiv.

Directed reading program

For several years I organized the Yale mathematics directed reading program (DRP), which pairs undergraduate students with a graduate mentor to do a reading of a certain math topic, not for credit. Usually, slightly non-standard topics are chosen and the undergraduate participants enjoy learning and meeting with their mentors. I have mentored seven students via the DRP, mostly reading Introduction to Stochastic Processes by Greg Lawler as well as adjacent topics depending on the interests of the students.