Undergraduate Student Paper Sessions

by Lyn Miller
Slippery Rock University


The MAA Student Talk Sessions were an outstanding success, with 107 presentations featuring 120 presenters.  This is a new record for MathFest, but one we’d be happy to break next year!

Prizes were awarded for outstanding work or presentation in several categories:

The CUR (Council on Undergraduate Research) Award annually goes to a student who gave an exceptional presentation on original research.  This year’s recipient was Hansheng Diao of MIT, who presented “On Measure-Preserving Transformations over Non-Archimedean Fields and Profinite Groups.”

The Andersen Prize, awarded in memory of Janet Andersen by the Bio SIGMAA, recognizes an outstanding presentation and work in areas related to mathematical biology.  This prize went to
Deena Hannoun  of James Madison University for “An Optimal Energy Allocation Strategy for Multiple Constrained Resources.”

Thanks to the generosity of the MAA, we were able to present eighteen MAA Outstanding Presentation Awards this year.  These awards recognize students who gave especially noteworthy presentations in any area of mathematics on original or learned topics.  The winners of these awards were:

  • Jessica Lin of New York Univerity for “Measurable Sensitivity and Chaotic Dynamical Systems”
  • Matt Alexander of Youngstown State University for “Cracking the Sudoku”
  • Ari Binder of Williams College and Josh O’Rourke of Reed College for their joint work on “Random Walks and Geometry of Directed Graphs”
  • Matthew Dawson of Union University for “Bridging the Group Definition Gap”
  • Katie Evans of St. Olaf College for “Permutation Tableaux and Combinatorial Sequences”
  • Tova Lindberg of Bethany Lutheran College for “Groups of Automorphisms of Compact Riemann Surfaces”
  • Amol Kapila of Brown University for “On the Two-Sided Power Distribution”
  • Gina Marie Richard of Goshen College for “Monotonic Power Indices”
  • Elizabeth Arango of Montclair State University for “The Behavior of DS-Divisors of Positive Integers”
  • Richelle Reed of Manchester College for “A Modeling Perspective of Subprime Mortgage Lending”
  • Jeremy Ward, Michelle Lingscheit, and Kiersten Ruff, all from Simpson College, for “L(3,2,1) Graph Labelling”
  • Ralph Morrison of Williams College for “Stick Knots”
  • Emily Marshall of Dartmouth College and Geoff Patterson of Grand Valley State University for “Gerrymandering, Convexity, and Shape Compactness”
  • Amanda Schaeffer of the University of Arizona for “Vector Coloring”
  • Matthew Katz of Juniata College for “The Many Tilings of a 2xn Board”
  • Drew Johnson of Brigham Young University for “Trapped Bubbles”
  • Crystal Red Eagle and Sam Rivera of the University of Texas at Arlington for “Soliton Solutions to the Nonlinear Schroedinger Equation”
  • Joshua Langford of the University of Texas at Tyler for “Order 6 Quandle Decomposition”
  • and Jon Dahlberg of Williams College for “The Geometry of Surfaces with Density.”





Congratulations again to all our winners, and to each and every student who presented at MathFest 2008!

           
Photos by Robert Vallin, MAA and Slippery Rock University