08/21/2026
Please welcome Dr. Stephen Flink to Ascent Classical Academy where he will be teaching Upper School mathematics.
Dr. Flink grew up in Colorado and spent time in his youth camping and fishing in the mountains. He studied mathematics at the University of Colorado Denver, where he also taught undergraduate math courses. Dr. Flink can tell you more than you would likely care to know about graph theory, abstract algebra, finite geometry and combinatorics. He has been teaching college mathematics for the past 14 years, and began teaching high school math in 2022. He believes that quantitative reasoning is an essential skill that is most readily attained in the teenage years, and he brings enthusiasm and broad knowledge to the classroom.
After graduating, Dr. Flink worked as a bioinformatics researcher at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus. The research studied genetics and genomics of alcohol-related behavior in rodent models. His time at Anschutz was a remarkable opportunity to be involved firsthand with scientific research in fields different from mathematics.
In his spare time, Dr. Flink is an avid reader, mostly of modern literature. His favorite authors include Knut Hamsun, Thomas Pynchon, Louise Erdrich, and Kazuo Ishiguro. He is attempting to tackle Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. There is a quotation from John von Neumann: “In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.” Dr. Flink interprets this to mean that students should engage with the mechanics of mathematics even if understanding is not immediate. In the end, understanding may take a different form than one is expecting.
Dr. Flink is both grateful and excited to join the Ascent community.
