Teaching and mentoring

I am very enthusiastic about teaching. Tutoring my younger siblings and cousins while growing up gave me important lessons about teaching strategies, learning patterns, personalized education plans, etc. I have continued to participate in teaching and mentoring throughout my student life. At Brandeis, I got several opportunities to mentor undergraduates. Currently, I am teaching a course that I designed as a University Prize Instructor. In this course, I am teaching how to use concepts from physics and mathematics and computer programming to create art.

PHYS 12B: Algorithmic Art

Special one-time offering: Spring 2024

Prerequisite: MATH 10a

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:45 pm to 2:05 pm

Room: Abelson 126

Course Description: Snowflakes, flower petals, the spiral arms of a galaxy, waves and dunes, the stripes on a tiger-all are examples of naturally occurring patterns. While a beautiful pattern appeals to the aesthetic side of our brains, it also begs the question of whether we can recreate such artful designs. Hence, there is a motivation to understand beauty with logic.

Mathematics provides us with tools to characterize patterns, and physics teaches us how to understand the emergence of patterns. This course will help you learn some selected topics in math and physics that you will use to create designs. You will learn to use computer programming to materialize these abstract concepts into powerful visuals. We will start our algorithmic art journey by discussing basics of coding, coordinate geometry, matrix algebra, and using each of these concepts to create something beautiful. Then we will move on to more advanced topics like cluster finding algorithm, differential equations and random walks, and use these sophisticated tools to make art.

This interdisciplinary, interactive course will encourage creativity and teach you many transferrable skills like coding, collaboration, deconstruction of a complex problem into simple parts, communication of ideas by visual means, and teamwork, all of which are useful skills for various types of projects. Towards the end of the semester, you will hear talks from professional artists about their approach to art. As students exploring visual art within the field of science, these talks will enrich our own understanding of beauty and aesthetics and teach you new concepts to apply in your own unique way in the creation of original science-inspired art. 

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