Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Descartes Comes Out Of The Closet, Nora E. Culik

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

While “Descartes Comes Out of the Closet” is ostensibly about a young woman’s journey to Paris, the descriptive detail borrows language and images from Cartesian coordinate geometry, dualistic philosophy, neuroanatomy (the pineal), and projections of three dimensions onto planes. This mathematical universe is counterpointed in the natural language of the suppressed love story that locates the real in the human. Thus, at the heart of the story is the tension between competing notions of mathematics, i.e., as either an independent realm apart from history or as a culturally produced and historical set of practices. Of course, the central character proves …

Random Tropical Curves, Magda L. Hlavacek

HMC Senior Theses

In the setting of tropical mathematics, geometric objects are rich with inherent combinatorial structure. For example, each polynomial $p(x,y)$ in the tropical setting corresponds to a tropical curve; these tropical curves correspond to unbounded graphs embedded in $\R^2$. Each of these graphs is dual to a particular subdivision of its Newton polytope; we classify tropical curves by combinatorial type based on these corresponding subdivisions. In this thesis, we aim to gain an understanding of the likeliness of the combinatorial type of a randomly chosen tropical curve by using methods from polytope geometry. We focus on tropical curves corresponding to quadratics, …

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Tropical Derivation Of Cohomology Ring Of Heavy/Light Hassett Spaces, Shiyue Li

HMC Senior Theses

The cohomology of moduli spaces of curves has been extensively studied in classical algebraic geometry. The emergent field of tropical geometry gives new views and combinatorial tools for treating these classical problems. In particular, we study the cohomology of heavy/light Hassett spaces, moduli spaces of heavy/light weighted stable curves, denoted as $\calm_{g, w}$ for a particular genus $g$ and a weight vector $w \in (0, 1]^n$ using tropical geometry. We survey and build on the work of \citet{Cavalieri2014}, which proved that tropical compactification is a \textit{wonderful} compactification of the complement of hyperplane arrangement for these heavy/light Hassett spaces. For $g …