Alex Vidinas

ALEX VIDINAS

OUTREACH

DIMEX (Discrete Mathematical Explorations):

DIMEX is an outreach proram funded by Karola Mészáros's NSF grant, intended to engage middle school students in problems in discrete mathematics. I facilitated it in Fall 2023, in Spring 2024, and in Fall 2025. My goal when writing the curriculum for DIMEX was to (1) have students engage with some tactile object or visual mathematical idea, (2) to teach skills in discrete mathematical reasoning and research, and (3) to have fun. Often, the mathematical content was framed in some whimsical way (framing eulerian graphs as maps of magic forests where the paths (edges) vanish behind you as you walk, or motivating the Binary search algorithm with a "dictionary race"). I wrote the first set of sessions jointly with Emily Dautenhahn, who is now an assistant professor at Gettysburg College. Each time I facilitated it since then, I incorporated new ideas to learn how my rotating co-facilitator thinks about teaching, while maintaining the goals I developed for the program.

Cornell Little Circle:

In Spring 2023, I co-taught a session of Little Circle with Mark Schachner, a 6th-year math grad student studying logic. Together, we led an interactive class geared at 3rd- through 5th-graders titled All About Infinity. In this class, we led activities designed to get students thinking about the infinite and to address questions children often have, such as "Is there a largest number?", "Are there different 'sizes' of infinity?", "Can I add together infinitely many things but get something not infinite?", etc. Some topics we covered included fractals, supertasks, and bijections between different countably infinite sets.

TEACHING HIGHLIGHTS

MATH 2310 (Linear Algebra for Data Science):

This course had previously been titled Applied Linear Algebra, but in Fall 2024, the title, curriculum, scope, and goal of MATH 2310 were entirely redesigned. That semester was its first as Linear Algebra for Data Science. As the first TA to teach after this rework, I was responsible for developing the material for the weekly discussion. I designed activities that introduced sudents to some of the theoretical underpinnings of the material they were learning in class, and I wrote programming activities to teach them introductory Python. The teaching assistants who followed have used my materials since. One activitity they have told me they especially liked is a workshop where students use graph theory to study social behavior theory in a pod of dolphins, based off of work by biologists at the University of Aberdeen and the University of Michigan.

MATH 1110 (Calculus I):

I was instructor of record twice at Cornell, once in Spring 2024 and once in Fall 2025. In this position, I centered groupwork and metacognition in my teaching and found ways to get students to not only learn about the course material, but to think about how they think aout the material. My goal in this was to train skills that extended beyond the calculus classroom.

MATH 1300 (Mathematical Explorations):

Twice, I assistant-taught MATH 1300, Mathematical Explorations: a class for undergrads in the social sciences and humanities that encourages students to rethink what they believe mathematics is and to build skills in collaboration, communication, and critical thinking. In Fall 2022, the course focused on theoretical mathematics, drawing on Fleron and Hotchkiss’s book Truth, Certainty, Reasoning, and Proof. In Fall 2023, the course focused on mathematical modeling, training students to be informed consumers of the mathematics they encounter in the world around them: in the media, in news, and in published works. In Fall of 2024, the course was focused on Mathematical modeling and developing mathematical literacy when consuming news and media.

DANCE INSTRUCTION

Cornell Swing Syndicate Instructing:

I am an instructor for the Swing Syndicate at Cornell (formerly the Cornell Graduate Swing Dance Society). As an instructor, I periodically teach dance lessons before the weekly social dance at Cornell's Graduate and Professional Student Center ("The Big Red Barn"). This activity merges my love of teaching and love of dance, and builds community among grad students at Cornell.

PMA 2800 (Introducttion to Acting):

In Spring 2024 and Fall 2025 I guest-taught dance in Introduction to Acting, alongside Professor J. Ellen Gainor in the department of Performing and Media Arts, for a few classes each term. These lessons were approximately 40 minutes each at the beginning of four of the classes. The intention behind these workshops was for the acting students to get experience interacting with other actors in space, as well as to develop general body awareness.

Jane Austen 250th Birthday Celebration:

In Fall 2025, I led a regency dance workshop at Cornell's celebration of Jane Austen's 250th birthday, jointly sponsored by the Department of Literatures in English and the Department of Performing and Media Arts.