Undergraduate Student Paper Sessions

by Daluss Siewert
Black Hills State University

The MAA Undergraduate Student Paper Sessions at MathFest were again a great success with 60 presentations featuring 68 presenters. Many attendees commented on the outstanding quality of the presentations.

Again the tradition of recognizing student achievement and participation at an ice cream social following the J. Sutherland Frame Lecture was continued. The packed room was full of anticipation and excitement as the awards were announced and all presenters were given T-shirts to thank them for their participation.

The winners of the various prizes are as follows:

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 Greg Burnham of Princeton University for his presentation "Initial Ideals and Graphs."

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 Robert Castellano of SUNY-Stony Brook and Derek Olson of Drake University for their presentation "Analysis of Type 1 Diabetes with Wavelets."

The Environmental SIGMAA awards recognize exceptional presentations that involve work on problems arising from environmental sources. These awards were given to John Ensley of Shippensburg Area High School for "A Numerical Study of an SIR Model" and Jason Holloway of Clarkson University for "Using Optical Flow for Botanical Video Analysis."

The SIAM (Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics) Awards were given to Miklos Zoltan Racz of Budapest University for "Competing Prices: Analyzing a Stochastic Interacting Particle System" and Tova Lindberg of Bethany Lutheran College for "Dominant Eigenvalues and the Structure of Matrix Spaces."

Thanks to the generosity of the MAA, we were able to present 15 MAA Outstanding Presentation Awards for students who gave especially noteworthy presentations in any area of mathematics on original or learned topics. The winners of these awards were:

• David Brandon Roberts of California State Univ., Northridge for "On the Maximum Number of Isosceles Right Triangles in a Finite Point Setâ?
• Kevin Greimel of Winona State University for ’Anatomy, Geometry, and Radio Repairmen: The Mathematics of Flawed Fretted Instrumentsâ?
• Jacqueline Chalmers of Augustana College for ’Creating Fractals of a Given Dimensionâ?
• Katherine Varga of Kent State University for ’Applications of Counting Techniques to Sudoku Variationsâ?
• Robert Lang and Curtis Nelson of Brigham Young University for ’The Minimum Rank Problem for Decomposable Graphsâ?
• Patrick Walker of Youngstown State University for ’Metric-Preserving Mappings and a Conjecture of Ulam'sâ?
• Laura Graham of Brigham Young University for ’Convex combinations of minimal graphsâ?
• William Nathan Hack of Armstrong Atlantic State University for ’Dancing with Deforming Pointsâ?
• Camille Jepsen of Brigham Young University and Emily McHenry of Xavier University for ’The Inverse Inertia Problem for Graphsâ?
• Elena Caffarelli of Canisius College for ’The Steiner problem in non-planar surfacesâ?
• Rene Ardila of City College of New York for ’Factorization in Integral Matrix Semigroupsâ?
• Robert George Vary of Penn State University for ’Some Arithmetic Properties of Overpartition k-Tuplesâ?
• Kaitlyn Hellenbrand of UW-Eau Claire for ’Polynomial Equations over Matricesâ?
• Kyle Golenbiewski of Grand Valley State University and Lisa Moats of Concordia College for ’Modeling Nonseparable Preferences in Referendum Electionsâ?
• Rachel Pepich of Illinois State University for ’General Model for Variations of the Even Cycle Problemâ?

Congratulations to each of the winners. We also want to say a special thank you to all those that presented and to their advisers for all their efforts ’ job well done! We hope to see you at MathFest again next year and hope that you will encourage your classmates to consider presenting in Pittsburgh next summer.

Of course, the awards are not possible without the generous help of volunteer judges. The following people volunteered to judge an entire undergraduate student paper session: Sharon McCathern, Andy Schultz, Tom McNamara, Violeta Vasilevska, Tim Chartier, Angel Pineda, Manda Riehl, Greg Warrington, Mike Axtell, Jeff Heath, Robin Cruz, Lesley Wiglesworth, Gretchen Koch, Jill Guerra, Adam Weyhaupt, TJ Hitchman, Thomas Sibley, Curtis Card, Kathryn Leonard, Ron Barnes, Ed Keppelmann, Joshua Holden, Patrick Rault, Jen Roche, Spencer Hamblen, Kristi Lampe, Leonida Ljumanovic, Robert Rovetti, Liz Stanhope, and Jake Wildstrom.

Thanks so much to all of you and we hope all of you will help us judge again next year.