Fernando Al Assal

Fernando Al Assal is a Van Vleck Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, serving from 2024 to 2027 as part of the Dynamics Research Training Group. His research centers on hyperbolic 3-manifolds and Teichmüller theory. Before joining UW-Madison, Al Assal was a postdoctoral researcher in Anna Wienhard's Geometry, Groups and Dynamics group at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig. He completed his PhD in Mathematics at Yale University in May 2023, advised by Yair Minsky. His dissertation, "Limits of asymptotically Fuchsian surfaces in a closed hyperbolic 3-manifold," was published in Geometry & Topology, Volume 30, Issue 1, pages 23-70 (2026). Al Assal earned his bachelor's degree in Mathematics from the University of Chicago.

Al Assal's publications include the co-authored preprint "Asymptotically geodesic surfaces" with Ben Lowe (arXiv:2502.17303, 2025), presented at the AMS Fall Western Sectional Meeting. Another preprint, "Slope gap distribution of the double heptagon and an algorithm for determining winning vectors," co-authored with Nada Ali, Uma Arengo, Sophia Zhou, and others (arXiv:2508.19252, 2025), stemmed from his co-mentoring of undergraduates in the 2023 Summer Undergraduate Mathematics Research at Yale program alongside Taylor McAdam. He has delivered invited talks on his research, including "Asymptotically geodesic surfaces in hyperbolic 3-manifolds" at the AMS sectional meeting, Group Actions and Dynamics Seminar at UW-Madison, and seminars at institutions such as the University of Chicago, MPI MiS, and Shanghai Institute for Mathematics and Interdisciplinary Sciences. During his undergraduate time at the University of Chicago, Al Assal participated in the REU and Directed Reading Program, contributing to a project on Lie algebras and representations. His work appears in prestigious venues, reflecting his contributions to low-dimensional topology and geometric group theory within the Mathematics faculty at UW-Madison.

Professional Email: alassal@wisc.edu