by Franklin Mendivil
Year of Award: 2007
Award: Hasse
Publication Information: The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 110, June-July 2003, pp. 503-515
Summary: One of the most amazing facets of mathematics is the experience of starting with a problem in one area of mathematics and then following the trail through several other areas to the solution (or several versions of the solution). The author illustrates this with a problem that starts out as a problem in rendering the attractor of an Iterated Function System (IFS), which leads to a solution that involves finding an Eulerian cycle in a certain graph and then to finding generators for the multiplicative group of a finite field.
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About the Author: Franklin Mendivil received his Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1996 and is a professor at Acadia University. His research interests include fractals and their applications in imaging and also work in genetic algorithms and other types of stochastic methods for global optimization.
Subject classification(s): Algebra and Number Theory | Abstract Algebra | Differential & Difference Equations | Dynamical Systems | Fractals | Discrete Mathematics | Graph Theory | Index