Mathematics Commons^™

Research In Sabermetrics: The Cape Cod Baseball League, Thomas Zinzarella

Mathematics & Computer Science Student Scholarship

Major: Sports Media

Faculty Mentor: Fr. Humbert Kilanowski O.P, Mathematics and Computer Science

We analyzed data from the Cape Cod Baseball League, a prestigious summer baseball league, where we looked at sabermetric statistics such as WAR (Wins above replacement). Stats like these can help evaluate a player and project whether they are a future MLB player or not. Especially on the Cape, where 1 in 7 current Major League Baseball players have played in the league.

Teaching And Learning Of Fluid Mechanics, Ashwin Vaidya

Department of Mathematics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Fluid mechanics occupies a privileged position in the sciences; it is taught in various science departments including physics, mathematics, environmental sciences and mechanical, chemical and civil engineering, with each highlighting a different aspect or interpretation of the foundation and applications of fluids. Doll’s fluid analogy [5] for this idea is especially relevant to this issue: “Emergence of creativity from complex flow of knowledge—example of Benard convection pattern as an analogy—dissipation or dispersal of knowledge (complex knowledge) results in emergent structures, i.e., creativity which in the context of education should be thought of as a unique way to arrange information so …

On The Mersenne Prime Numbers, Julia Vanlandingham

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

The prime numbers have been an important field of research for thousands of years and are intertwined with most other fields of mathematics. One topic that has piqued the interest of mathematicians young and old is the Mersenne prime numbers, which have applications in many mathematics and computer science fields. The Mersenne primes get a lot of attention because there is not much known about them. However, we do have a very simple primality test for Mersenne numbers, which is why the largest currently known primes are Mersenne primes. These primes are also very closely related to another class of …

Searching Games: A Bound For The Responder, Jose Garcia

Student Scholars Day Oral Presentations

A searching game with two unknowns and a lie involves two players, the responder and the questioner. Before the start of the game, the two parties predetermine an amount of numbers n to consider, and how many questions k the questioner can ask before the game ends with a victory (or loss) for the responder. The responder thinks of two secret numbers. The questioner asks questions of the form "How many of your two numbers are in the subset Q of the set {0,...,n-1}?", in an attempt to search and find what the two secret numbers are. If the questioner …

Higher Chow Cycles On The Jacobian Of Curves., Subham Sarkar Dr.

Doctoral Theses

The following formula, usually called Beilinson’s formula — though independently due to Deligne as well — describes the motivic cohomology group of a smooth projective variety X over a number field as the group of extensions in a conjectured abelian category of mixed motives, MMQ.The aim of this thesis is to describe this construction in the case of the motivic cohomology group of the Jacobian of a curve. The first work in this direction is due to Harris [Har83] and Pulte [Pul88], [Hai87]. They showed that the Abel-Jacobi image of the modified diagonal cycle on the triple product of a …

A Mathematical Model Of Speeding, Jared Ott, Xavier Pérez Giménez

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Crime is often regarded as nonsensical, impulsive, and irrational. These conjectures are pointed, though conversation about the pros and cons of crime does not happen often. People point to harsh fines, jail times, and life restrictions as their reason for judgement, stating that the trade-offs are far too unbalanced to participate in illicit activity. Yet, everyday people commit small crimes, sometimes based on hedonistic desires, other times based on a rational thought process.

Speeding seems to be one of those that almost all people commit at least once during their life. Our work hopes to make an incremental improvement on …

Characterization Of Eigenfunctions Of The Laplace-Beltrami Operator Through Radial Averages On Rank One Symmetric Spaces., Muna Naik Dr.

Doctoral Theses

Let X be a rank one Riemannian symmetric space of noncompact type and ∆ be the Laplace–Beltrami operator of X. The space X can be identified with the quotient space G/K where G is a connected noncompact semisimple Lie group of real rank one with finite centre and K is a maximal compact subgroup of G. Thus G acts naturally on X by left translations. Through this identification, a function or measure on X is radial (i.e. depends only on the distance from eK), when it is invariant under the left-action of K. We consider right-convolution operators Θ on functions …

The User's Guide Project: Looking Back And Looking Forward, Don Larson, Kristen Mazur, David White, Carolyn Yarnall

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In 2014 Luke Wolcott created the User's Guide Project, in which a group of algebraic topologists came together to write user's guides to coincide with their research papers in hopes of making their research more accessible. We examine the role of this innovative project within the greater mathematics community. We discuss the structure and history of the project, its impact on the community, and its value to the participants of the project. We end by encouraging the math community to recognize the value of the project and expand the User's Guide Project to other subfields.

On Not Teaching Addition: A Homeschooling Parent Teaches And Researches Math, Marion D. Cohen

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Interactions with the humans in one’s life can have bearings on the way one interacts with one’s work – and vice versa. In particular, the ways in which a math person who is also a parent interacts with their children can correlate with the ways that person interacts with students, colleagues, and with math itself. This article describes some of that correlation in one mathmom’s life. In particular, this mathmom worked toward balancing, both as a mom and as a teacher, her beliefs and feelings with societal mindsets and practices.

A Study Of Operators On The Discrete Analogue Of Hardy Spaces On Homogeneous Trees And On Other Structures., P. Muthukumar Dr.

Doctoral Theses

In analytic function theory, the study of multiplication and composition operators has a rich structure for various analytic function spaces of the unit disk D = {z ∈ C : |z| < 1} such as the Hardy spaces Hp, the Bergman spaces Ap and the Bloch space B. This theory connects the operator theoretic properties such as boundedness, compactness, spectrum, invertibility, isometry with that of the function theoretic properties of the inducing map (symbol) such as bijectivity, boundary behaviour and vise versa In Chapter 2, we define discrete analogue of generalized Hardy spaces (Tp) and their separable subspaces (Tp,0) on a homogenous rooted tree and study some of their properties such as completeness, inclusion relations with other spaces, separability and growth estimate for functions in these spaces and their consequences. In Chapter 3, we obtain equivalent conditions for multiplication operators Mψ on Tp and Tp,0 to be bounded and compact. Furthermore, we discuss point spectrum, approximate point spectrum and spectrum of multiplication operators and discuss when a multiplication operator is an isometry. In Chapter 4, we give an equivalent conditions for the composition operator Cφ to be bounded on Tp and on Tp,0 spaces and compute their operator norms. We have considered the composition operators induced by special symbols such as univalent and multivalent maps and automorphism of a homogenous tree. We also characterize invertible composition operators and isometric composition operators on Tp and on Tp,0 spaces. Also, we discuss the compactness of Cφ on Tp spaces and finally we prove that there are no compact composition operators on Tp,0 spaces. In Chapter 5, we consider the composition operators on the Hardy-Dirichlet space H2, the space of Dirichlet series with square summable coefficients. By using the Schur test, we give some upper and lower estimates on the norm of a composition operator on H2 , for the affine-like inducing symbol ϕ(s) = c1 + cqq −s , where q ≥ 2 is a fixed integer. We also give an estimate for approximation numbers of a composition operators in our H2 setting. In Chapter 6, we study the weighted composition operators preserving the class Pα. Some of its consequences and examples of certain special cases are presented. Furthermore, we discuss about the fixed points of weighted composition operators.

Math Department 2019-2020 Newsletter, Mathematics Department

Mathematics Newsletter

Welcome to our annual Mathematics Department Newsletter. This was an unusual year for our department as the coronavirus cut short our time on campus this year. Hence we were unable to have our usual events such as the Annual Mathematics Lecture, the Pi Mu Epsilon Induction and Awards Night, and there was no in-person commencement ceremony. But despite that, many great things happened in our department.

Discrepancy Inequalities In Graphs And Their Applications, Adam Purcilly

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Spectral graph theory, which is the use of eigenvalues of matrices associated with graphs, is a modern technique that has expanded our understanding of graphs and their structure. A particularly useful tool in spectral graph theory is the Expander Mixing Lemma, also known as the discrepancy inequality, which bounds the edge distribution between two sets based on the spectral gap. More specifically, it states that a small spectral gap of a graph implies that the edge distribution is close to random. This dissertation uses this tool to study two problems in extremal graph theory, then produces similar discrepancy inequalities based …

Math Across The Curriculum, Kelsey Mason

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

A Cool Brisk Walk Through Discrete Mathematics, Stephen Davies

Computer Science Articles

A Cool Brisk Walk Through Discrete Mathematics - and its companion site "allthemath" - are completely-and-forever-free-and-open-source educational materials dedicated to the mathematics that budding computer science practitioners actually need to know. They feature the fun and addictive teaching of award-winning lecturer Dr. Stephen Davies of the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia!

Trigonometry: A Brief Conversation, Carolyn D. King Phd, Tam Evelyn, Fei Ye Phd, Beata Ewa Carvajal

Open Educational Resources

These five units are specifically tailored to foster the mastery of a few selected trigonometry topics that comprise the one credit MA-121 Elementary Trigonometry course. Each unit introduces the topic, provides space for practice, but more importantly, provides opportunities for students to reflect on the work in order to deepen their conceptual understanding.

These units have also been assigned to students of other courses such as pre-calculus and calculus as a review of trigonometric basics essential to those courses. This is the second edition of the materials. Units 4 and 5 have been edited to reflect suggestions from instructors who …

Middle-School Mathematics Teachers' Use Of Formative Assessment Data, Shawana T. Green

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

A school district located in the southeastern United States uses benchmark tests as formative assessment to provide teachers with data to differentiate their instruction to meet the individual needs of students in their classrooms. Despite this effort, student achievement in mathematics in this school district has not improved. The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of how middle-grade mathematics teachers used the benchmark results as formative data to guide instruction and meet student needs. The conceptual framework that grounded this study was the model of formative assessment developed by Black and Wiliam. For this basic qualitative study, …

Teacher Support Of Co- And Socially-Shared Regulation Of Learning In Middle School Mathematics Classrooms, Melissa Quackenbush, Linda Bol

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Faculty Publications

Social influences on classroom learning have a long research tradition and are critical components of self-regulated learning theories. More recently, researchers have explored the social influences of self-regulated learning in cooperative learning contexts. In these settings, co-regulation of learning and socially-shared regulation of learning strategies have been aligned with self-regulated learning theory. However, without specific training or structure, teachers are not likely to explicitly integrate SRL strategies into their teaching. We use case studies to better understand how Zimmerman's theory of self-regulated learning (2008) and Hadwin's conceptual framework of socially-shared regulation of learning (2018) emerge from teachers' support of student-centered …

Math 3100 - Mathematical Thinking: Communication And Proof - Week 1 Outline, Laura J. Wallace, Cory Johnson, Shawn Mcmurran, Min-Lin Lo

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

As a group, we hope through this FLC project to develop a course that promotes departmental SLOs, as well as University learning outcomes for a writing-intensive course. We focused on our new foundational course (MATH 3100 Mathematical Thinking: Communication and Proof). This course, designated as a writing-intensive course, introduces students to disciplinary ways of thinking and communicating in mathematics with emphasis on the construction of valid mathematical arguments, critiques of arguments, and structure of professional mathematical writing including typesetting. We would like to develop a library of useful materials that faculty members can adapt in their classrooms in order to …

Math 3100: Communication And Proof - Assessment, Shawn Mcmurran, Min-Lin Lo, Corrine Johnson, Laura Wallace

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

As a group, we hope through this FLC project to develop a course that promotes departmental SLOs, as well as University learning outcomes for a writing-intensive course. We focused on our new foundational course (MATH 3100 Mathematical Thinking: Communication and Proof). This course, designated as a writing-intensive course, introduces students to disciplinary ways of thinking and communicating in mathematics with emphasis on the construction of valid mathematical arguments, critiques of arguments, and structure of professional mathematical writing including typesetting. We would like to develop a library of useful materials that faculty members can adapt in their classrooms in order to …

Geometry Of Linear Subspace Arrangements With Connections To Matroid Theory, William Trok

Theses and Dissertations--Mathematics

This dissertation is devoted to the study of the geometric properties of subspace configurations, with an emphasis on configurations of points. One distinguishing feature is the widespread use of techniques from Matroid Theory and Combinatorial Optimization. In part we generalize a theorem of Edmond's about partitions of matroids in independent subsets. We then apply this to establish a conjectured bound on the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of a set of fat points.

We then study how the dimension of an ideal of point changes when intersected with a generic fat subspace. In particular we introduce the concept of a ``very unexpected hypersurface'' …

Curving Towards Bézout: An Examination Of Plane Curves And Their Intersection, Camron Alexander Robey Cohen

Honors Papers

One area of interest in studying plane curves is intersection. Namely, given two plane curves, we are interested in understanding how they intersect. In this paper, we will build the machinery necessary to describe this intersection. Our discussion will include developing algebraic tools, describing how two curves intersect at a given point, and accounting for points at infinity by way of projective space. With all these tools, we will prove Bézout’s theorem, a robust description of the intersection between two curves relating the degrees of the defining polynomials to the number of points in the intersection.

Use Of Calculators In High School Mathematics, Alex Mcdaniel

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

For many collegiate level mathematics courses at universities across the country, students are not allowed to use calculators. This is often a huge adjustment for students who have spent their entire high school career using calculators. Whether it is graphing or simple arithmetic, students relied on calculators in high school, but for college, the tool of a calculator may not be available for them. This leads to a multitude of questions: Should calculators be used in high school? Do calculators help students learn or are they simply a tool to get answers? Are calculators beneficial in some courses, but not …

The Ubiquity Of Phi In Human Culture & The Natural World, Jennifer Bressler

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

A Mathematical Analysis Of The Game Of Santorini, Carson Clyde Geissler

Senior Independent Study Theses

Santorini is a two player combinatorial board game. Santorini bears resemblance to the graph theory game of Geography, a game of moving and deleting vertices on a graph. We explore Santorini with game theory, complexity theory, and artificial intelligence. We present David Lichtenstein’s proof that Geography is PSPACE-hard and adapt the proof for generalized forms of Santorini. Last, we discuss the development of an AI built for a software implementation of Santorini and present a number of improvements to that AI.

Communicating In Crisis Situations, Rick Gorvett, Chris Morse, Julie Volkman

Communication Faculty Journal Articles

Communicating technical information, especially in a crisis situation and particularly when the audience does not share the technical background, is a challenge that actuaries frequently face. This essay describes the dynamics and issues involved in crisis communications and provides some recommendations for actuaries confronting such a situation.

New Challenges In Neutrosophic Theory And Applications, Florentin Smarandache, Stefan Vladutescu, Miihaela Colhon, Wadei Al-Omeri, Saeid Jafari, Muhammad Zahir Khan, Muhammad Farid Khan, Muhammad Aslam, Abdur Razzaque Mughal

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Neutrosophic theory has representatives on all continents and, therefore, it can be said to be a universal theory. On the other hand, according to the three volumes of “The Encyclopedia of Neutrosophic Researchers” (2016, 2018, 2019), plus numerous others not yet included in Encyclopedia book series, about 1200 researchers from 73 countries have applied both the neutrosophic theory and method. Neutrosophic theory was founded by Professor Florentin Smarandache in 1998; it constitutes further generalization of fuzzy and intuitionistic fuzzy theories. The key distinction between the neutrosophic set/logic and other types of sets/logics lies in the introduction of the degree of …

Isolated Point Theorems For Uniform Algebras On Smooth Manifolds, Swarup Ghosh

Faculty Articles & Research

In 1957, Andrew Gleason conjectured that if A is a uniform algebra on its maximal ideal space X and every point of X is a one-point Gleason part for A, then A must contain all continuous functions on X. Gleason’s conjecture was disproved by Brian Cole in 1968. In this paper, we establish a strengthened form of Gleason’s conjecture for uniform algebras generated by real-analytic functions on compact subsets of real-analytic three-dimensional manifolds-with-boundary.

Reflection On Use Of The "Reacting To The Past" Pedagogy In A History Of Mathematics Course, Davida Fischman

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

This brief report provides a reflection on the use of the "Reacting to the Past" (RTTP) pedagogy in a History of Mathematics classroom. The conclusion is drawn that the RTTP pedagogy is very successful in engaging students in active learning, and appropriate games may be utilized to help students learn about the role of mathematics in historical developments as well as in society today.

Student Perceptions Of Learning Introductory Mathematics In An Online Environment In Higher Education, Jamie Lynn Brooks

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological study was to describe the essence of student perception of learning introductory mathematics courses in an online environment at the college level. The central research question was, “What are the lived experiences of students who have completed introductory college mathematics courses in the online learning environment?” The phenomenon described was that of the beliefs and attitudes of the students who participated in introductory mathematics courses on the college level. The ideas explored were if students believe they learn effectively in this environment and how they believe they can best learn. Student beliefs and attitudes …

Σ-Ary, Minnesota State University Moorhead, Mathematics Department

Math Department Newsletters

No abstract provided.