Applied Mathematics Commons^™

Connecting Mathematics Students To Philosophy And Faith, Nathan Moyer

ACMS Journal 2010-2011

This paper describes an upper-division class project that helps students wrestle with the deep philosophical questions of mathematics in a relevant way. Through article readings and group discussions, various historical views of mathematical philosophy are examined and critiqued. An emphasis is placed upon students making meaningful connections between their own views of mathematics and their personal Christian faith or worldview.

Lead-Acid Battery Model Under Discharge With A Fast Splitting Method, R. Corban Harwood, Valipuram S. Manoranjan, Dean B. Edwards

Faculty Publications - Department of Mathematics

A mathematical model of a valve-regulated lead-acid battery under discharge is presented as simplified from a standard electrodynamics model. This nonlinear reaction–diffusion model of a battery cell is solved using an operator splitting method to quickly and accurately simulate sulfuric acid concentration. This splitting method incorporates one-sided approximation schemes to preserve continuity over material interfaces encompassing discontinuous parameters. Numerical results are compared with measured data by calculating battery voltage from modeled acid concentration as derived from the Nernst equation.

Vascular Countercurrent Network For 3d Triple-Layered Skin Structure With Radiation Heating, Xiaoqi Zeng

Doctoral Dissertations

Heat transfer in living tissue has become more and more attention for researchers, because high thermal radiation produced by intense fire, such as wild fires, chemical fires, accidents, warfare, terrorism, etc, is often encountered in human's daily life. Living tissue is a heterogeneous organ consisting of cellular tissue and blood vessels, and heat transfer in cellular tissue and blood vessel is quite different, because the blood vessels provide channels for fast heat transfer. The metabolic heat generation, heat conduction and blood perfusion in soft tissue, convection and perfusion of the arterial-venous blood through the capillary, and interaction with the environment …

Epidemic Spread Of Influenza Viruses: The Impact Of Transient Populations On Disease Dynamics, Karen R. Ríos-Soto, Baojun Song, Carlos Castillo-Chavez

Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The recent H1N1 ("swine u") pandemic and recent H5N1 ("avian u") outbreaks have brought increased attention to the study of the role of animal populations as reservoirs for pathogens that could invade human populations. It is believed that pigs acquired u strains from birds and humans, acting as a mixing vessel in generating new influenza viruses. Assessing the role of animal reservoirs, particularly reservoirs involving highly mobile populations (like migratory birds), on disease dispersal and persistence is of interests to a wide range of researchers including public health experts and evolutionary biologists. This paper studies the interactions between transient and …

Physical Process Models As Regularization Constraints On Geophysical Imaging Problems, Rachel Grotheer

All Theses

Obtaining accurate images of solute plumes in the subsurface is important to understand site-specific subsurface flow and transport processes. Since image reconstruction is an inverse problem, its ill-posed nature makes obtaining an accurate, high-resolution image difficult. Further, current geophysical methods for plume imaging do not take into account models of the specific process being targeted for imaging.
The main objective of the research is to find a suitable basis that gives a sparse representation of the plume. In future work, we seek to use this basis as a physical constraint during the inversion so as to increase accuracy in imaging. …

Twisted Frobenius-Schur Indicators For Hopf Algebras, Maria Vega

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The classical Frobenius--Schur indicators for finite groups are character sums defined for any representation and any integer $m\ge 2$. In the familiar case $m=2$, the Frobenius--Schur indicator partitions the irreducible representations over the complex numbers into real, complex, and quaternionic representations. In recent years, several generalizations of these invariants have been introduced. Bump and Ginzburg in 2004, building on earlier work of Mackey from 1958, have defined versions of these indicators which are twisted by an automorphism of the group. In another direction, Linchenko and Montgomery in 2000 defined Frobenius--Schur indicators for finite dimensional semisimple Hopf algebras. In this dissertation, …

Excluded-Minor Characterization Of Apex-Outerplanar Graphs, Stanislaw Dziobiak

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

It is well known that the class of outerplanar graphs is minor-closed and can be characterized by two excluded minors: K_4 and K_{2,3}. The class of graphs that contain a vertex whose removal leaves an outerplanar graph is also minor-closed. We provide the complete list of 57 excluded minors for this class.

Software Development For A Three-Dimensional Gravity Inversion And Application To Study Of The Border Ranges Fault System, South-Central Alaska, Rolando Cardenas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Border Ranges Fault System (BRFS) bounds the Cook Inlet and Susitna Basins, an important petroleum province within south-central Alaska. A primary goal in the research is to test several plausible models of structure along the Border Ranges Fault System using a novel three-dimensional inversion utilizing gravity and magnetic data, constrained with other geophysical, borehole and surface geological information. This research involves the development of inversion modeling software using a Borland C++ compiler as part of the Rapid Application Development (RAD) Studio. The novel inversion approach directly models known geology, and "a priori" uncertainties on the geologic model to allow …

An Exploration Of Modeling Techniques For The Study Of The Dynamics Of E-Mail Viruses, Karin Weule

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

We analyze real data sets from two e-mail viruses, the Magistr.b and the Sircam.a to explore how we can use mathematical models to predict the behavior described by the data. Analysis of the data is conducted primarily with computer programming in MatLab. We focus mainly on the use of two continuous models commonly used in the study of biological diseases, the SIS and the SIR models. A discrete modeling approach using agent-based simulations is also explored and revealed to be potentially useful in developing a compartmentalized model that incorporates both SIS and SIR model behavior. The theory behind the continuous …

Riordan Arrays Associated With Laurent Series And Generalized Sheffer-Type Groups, Tian-Xiao He

Scholarship

A relationship between a pair of Laurent series and Riordan arrays is formulated. In addition, a type of generalized Sheffer groups is defined using Riordan arrays with respect to power series with non-zero coefficients. The isomorphism between a generalized Sheffer group and the group of the Riordan arrays associated with Laurent series is established. Furthermore, Appell, associated, Bell, and hitting-time subgroups of the groups are defined and discussed. A relationship between the generalized Sheffer groups with respect to different power series is presented. The equivalence of the defined Riordan array pairs and generalized Stirling number pairs is given. A type …

How Do Neurons Work Together? Lessons From Auditory Cortex, Kenneth D. Harris, Peter Bartho, Paul Chadderton, Carina Curto, Jaime De La Rocha, Liad Hollender, Vladimir Itskov, Artur Luczak, Stephan Marguet, Alfonso Renart, Shuzo Sakata

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

Recordings of single neurons have yielded great insights into the way acoustic stimuli are represented in auditory cortex. However, any one neuron functions as part of a population whose combined activity underlies cortical information processing. Here we review some results obtained by recording simultaneously from auditory cortical populations and individual morphologically identified neurons, in urethane-anesthetized and unanesthetized passively listening rats. Auditory cortical populations produced structured activity patterns both in response to acoustic stimuli, and spontaneously without sensory input. Population spike time patterns were broadly conserved across multiple sensory stimuli and spontaneous events, exhibiting a generally conserved sequential organization lasting approximately …

Neural Spike Renormalization. Part I — Universal Number 1, Bo Deng

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

For a class of circuit models for neurons, it has been shown that the transmembrane electrical potentials in spike bursts have an inverse correlation with the intra-cellular energy conversion: the fewer spikes per burst the more energetic each spike is. Here we demonstrate that as the per-spike energy goes down to zero, a universal constant to the bifurcation of spike-bursts emerges in a similar way as Feigenbaum’s constant does to the period-doubling bifurcation to chaos generation, and the new universal constant is the first natural number 1.

Asymptotic Expansions And Stability Of Hybrid Systems With Two-Time Scales, Dung Tien Nguyen

Wayne State University Dissertations

In this dissertation, we consider solutions of hybrid systems in which both continuous dynamics and discrete events coexists. One

of the main ingredients of our models is the two-time-scale formulation. Under broad conditions, asymptotic expansions are developed for the solutions of the systems of backward equations for switching diffusion in two classes of models, namely, fast switching systems and fast diffusion systems. To prove the validity of the asymptotic expansions, uniform error bounds are obtained.

In the second part of the dissertation, a singular linear system is considered. Again a two-time-scale formulation is used. Under suitable conditions, the system has …

On The (Non)-Integrability Of Kdv Hierarchy With Self-Consistent Sources, Vladimir Gerdjikov, Georgi Grahovski, Rossen Ivanov

Articles

Nonholonomic deformations of integrable equations of the KdV hierarchy are studied by using the expansions over the so-called “squared solutions” (squared eigenfunctions). Such deformations are equivalent to a perturbed model with external (self-consistent) sources. In this regard, the KdV6 equation is viewed as a special perturbation of KdV. Applying expansions over the symplectic basis of squared eigenfunctions, the integrability properties of the KdV6 equation are analysed. This allows for a formulation of conditions on the perturbation terms that preserve its integrability. The perturbation corrections to the scattering data and to the corresponding action-angle (canonical) variables are studied. The analysis shows …

Rational Bundles And Recursion Operators For Integrable Equations On A.Iii-Type Symmetric Spaces, Vladimir Gerdjikov, Georgi Grahovski, Alexander Mikhailov, Tihomir Valtchev

Articles

We analyze and compare the methods of construction of the recursion operators for a special class of integrable nonlinear differential equations related to A.III-type symmetric spaces in Cartan’s classification and having additional reductions.

Solving The Partial Differential Equation Of Vibrations With Interval Parameters Using The Interval Finite Difference Method, Brenda G. Medina

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Accuracy and efficiency are among the main factors that drive today's innovative disciplines. As technology rapidly advances, efficiency takes on new meanings but what about accuracy? How accurate is accurate? Human error, uncertainties in measurement, and rounding errors are just some causes of inaccuracy. Interval Computations is an area that allows for such issues to be taken into account; for each measurement attained (for example), an interval can be built by considering the error associated with the measurement, and such an interval can be utilized in the mathematical computations of interest.

We consider the partial differential equation (PDE) of vibrations …

Symmetric Nonconforming Mixed Finite Elements For Linear Elasticity, Jay Gopalakrishnan, Johnny Guzmán

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present a family of mixed methods for linear elasticity that yield exactly symmetric, but only weakly conforming, stress approximations. The method is presented in both two and three dimensions (on triangular and tetrahedral meshes). The method is efficiently implementable by hybridization. The degrees of freedom of the Lagrange multipliers, which approximate the displacements at the faces, solve a symmetric positive-definite system. The design and analysis of this method is motivated by a new set of unisolvent degrees of freedom for symmetric polynomial matrices. These new degrees of freedom are also used to give a new simple calculation of the …

Commuting Smoothed Projectors In Weighted Norms With An Application To Axisymmetric Maxwell Equations, Jay Gopalakrishnan, Minah Oh

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We construct finite element projectors that can be applied to functions with low regularity. These projectors are continuous in a weighted norm arising naturally when modeling devices with axial symmetry. They have important commuting diagram properties needed for finite element analysis. As an application, we use the projectors to prove quasioptimal convergence for the edge finite element approximation of the axisymmetric time-harmonic Maxwell equations on nonsmooth domains. Supplementary numerical investigations on convergence deterioration at high wavenumbers and near Maxwell eigenvalues and are also reported.

Analysis Of Hdg Methods For Stokes Flow, Bernardo Cockburn, Jay Gopalakrishnan, Ngoc Cuong Nguyen, Jaume Peraire, Francisco-Javier Sayas

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper, we analyze a hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin method for numerically solving the Stokes equations. The method uses polynomials of degree $ k$ for all the components of the approximate solution of the gradient-velocity-pressure formulation. The novelty of the analysis is the use of a new projection tailored to the very structure of the numerical traces of the method. It renders the analysis of the projection of the errors very concise and allows us to see that the projection of the error in the velocity superconverges. As a consequence, we prove that the approximations of the velocity gradient, the …

A Second Elasticity Element Using The Matrix Bubble, Jay Gopalakrishnan, Johnny Guzmán

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We presented a family of finite elements that use a polynomial space augmented by certain matrix bubbles in Cockburn et al. (2010) A new elasticity element made for enforcing weak stress symmetry. Math. Comput., 79, 1331–1349 . In this sequel we exhibit a second family of elements that use the same matrix bubble. This second element uses a stress space smaller than the first while maintaining the same space for rotations (which are the Lagrange multipliers corresponding to a weak symmetry constraint). The space of displacements is of one degree less than the first method. The analysis, while similar to …

Essays On Hedge Fund Replication: Methodological Assessment And Development Of The Factor Approach, Nonlinear Modeling And Policy Perspectives, Guillaume Weisang

2011

This dissertation is concerned with hedge fund replication, a subject of a practical and theoretical importance, both from an investment and a risk management point of view. One of our goals is to extend known methodologies in order to enhance our understanding of an industry that is known for its secrecy and its lack of transparency. A second goal is to contribute to the quantitative finance literature with improved techniques for hedge fund replication. Hedge fund replication (HFR) is approached from the methodological as well as from practical and regulatory perspectives. The first two chapters provide the motivation and the …

Fully Nonlinear Boundary Value Problems With Impulse, Paul Eloe, Muhammad Usman

Mathematics Faculty Publications

An impulsive boundary value problem with nonlinear boundary conditions for a second order ordinary differential equation is studied. In particular, sufficient conditions are provided so that a compression- expansion cone theoretic fixed point theorem can be applied to imply the existence of positive solutions. The nonlinear forcing term is assumed to satisfy usual sublinear or superlinear growth as t → ∞ or t → 0 +. The nonlinear impulse terms and the nonlinear boundary terms are assumed to satisfy the analogous asymptotic behavior.

Prospective Teachers' Use Of Representations In Solving Statistical Tasks With Dynamic Statistical Software, Hollylynne Lee, Shannon O. Driskell, Suzanne R. Harper, Keith R. Leatham, Gladis Kersaint, Robin L. Angotti

Mathematics Faculty Publications

This study examined a random stratified sample (n=62) of prospective teachers' work across eight institutions on three tasks that utilized dynamic statistical software. Our work was guided by considering how teachers may utilize their statistical knowledge and technological statistical knowledge to engage in cycles of investigation. Although teachers did not tend to take full advantage of dynamic linking capabilities, they utilized a large variety of graphical representations and often added statistical measures or other augmentations to graphs as part of their analysis.

Non-Normality Points Of Β X\X, William Fleissner, Lynne Yengulalp

Mathematics Faculty Publications

We seek conditions implying that (β X\X) \ {y} is not normal. Our main theorem: Assume GCH and all uniform ultrafilters are regular. If X is a locally compact metrizable space without isolated points, then (β X\X) \ {y} is not normal for all y ∈ β X\X. In preparing to prove this theorem, we generalize the notions “uniform”, “regular”, and “good” from set ultrafilters to z-ultrafilters. We discuss non-normality points of the product of a discrete space and the real line. We topologically embed a nonstandard real line into the remainder of this product space.

Algorithms For Area Preserving Flows, Catherine Kublik, Selim Esedoglu, Jeffrey A. Fessler

Mathematics Faculty Publications

We propose efficient and accurate algorithms for computing certain area preserving geometric motions of curves in the plane, such as area preserving motion by curvature. These schemes are based on a new class of diffusion generated motion algorithms using signed distance functions. In particular, they alternate two very simple and fast operations, namely convolution with the Gaussian kernel and construction of the distance function, to generate the desired geometric flow in an unconditionally stable manner. We present applications of these area preserving flows to large scale simulations of coarsening.

Dispersive Wave Equations For Solids With Microstructure, A. Berezovski, Juri Engelbrecht, Mihhail Berezovski

Publications

The dispersive wave motion in solids with microstructure is considered in the one-dimensional setting in order to understand better the mechanism of dispersion. It is shown that the variety of dispersive wave propagation models derived by homogenization, continualisation, and generalization of continuum mechanics can be unified in the framework of dual internal variables theory.

Analysis Of The Dpg Method For The Poisson Equation, Leszek Demkowicz, Jay Gopalakrishnan

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We give an error analysis of the recently developed DPG method applied to solve the Poisson equation and a convection-dffusion problem. We prove that the method is quasioptimal. Error estimates in terms of both the mesh size h and the polynomial degree p (for various element shapes) can be derived from our results. Results of extensive numerical experiments are also presented.

Improving Math Instruction In Schools That Serve The Poor, John, L. Jr. Sims

LSU Master's Theses

Public alarm concerning how well U.S. schools are performing in mathematics compared to other developed nations is increasing. Reports of inadequate teaching, poor curriculum design, and low performance on standardized test have been fueled by the media. These issues in American mathematics classrooms are far compounded in schools that serve the poorest in America. When comparing mathematical proficiency rates of U.S. schools with other countries, schools with less than 25% free and reduced lunch score competitively with counterparts in other countries. In contrast, schools with rates of free and reduced lunch higher than 50% score dismally in comparison. Conditions such …

Symmetric Spaces, Se-Jong Kim

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

We first review the basic theory of a general class of symmetric spaces with canonical reflections, midpoints, and displacement groups. We introduce a notion of gyrogroups established by A. A. Ungar and define gyrovector spaces slightly different from Ungar's setting. We see the categorical equivalence of symmetric spaces and gyrovector spaces with respect to their corresponding operations. In a smooth manifold with spray we define weighted means using the exponential map and develop the Lie-Trotter formula with respect to midpoint operation. Via the idea that we associate a spray with a Loos symmetric space, we construct an analytic scalar multiplication …

Shock-Associated Noise Generation In Curved Coanda Turbulent Wall Jets, Caroline P. Lubert, Richard J. Shafer

Department of Mathematics and Statistics - Faculty Scholarship

Curved three-dimensional turbulent Coanda wall jets are present in a multitude of natural and engineering applications. The mechanism by which they form a shock-cell structure is poorly understood, as is the accompanying shock-associated noise (SAN) generation. This paper discusses these phenomena from both a modeling and experimental perspective. The Method of Characteristics is used to rewrite the governing hyperbolic partial differential equations as ordinary differential equations, which are then solved numerically using the Euler predictor-corrector method. The effects of complicating factors -- such as radial expansion and streamline curvature -- on the prediction of shock-cell location are then discussed. This …