Mathematics Commons^™

Counting Rational Points, Integral Points, Fields, And Hypersurfaces, Joseph Gunther

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis comes in four parts, which can be read independently of each other.

In the first chapter, we prove a generalization of Poonen's finite field Bertini theorem, and use this to show that the obvious obstruction to embedding a curve in some smooth surface is the only obstruction over perfect fields, extending a result of Altman and Kleiman. We also prove a conjecture of Vakil and Wood on the asymptotic probability of hypersurface sections having a prescribed number of singularities.

In the second chapter, for a fixed base curve over a finite field of characteristic at least 5, we …

The Resolved And Unresolved Conjectures Of R.D. Carmichael, Brian D. Beasley

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2017

Even before heading to Princeton University to work on his doctoral degree, Robert Daniel Carmichael started influencing the path of number theory in the 20th century. From his study of Euler's totient function to his discovery of the first absolute pseudoprime, he set the stage for years of productive research. This talk will present a brief overview of Carmichael's life, including his breadth of mathematical interests and his service on behalf of the Mathematical Association of America. It will focus mainly on his two most famous conjectures- which one has been settled, and which one remains open to this day?

"Big Idea" Reflection Assignments For Learning And Valuing Mathematics, Jeremy Case, Mark Colgan

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2017

While participating in a Faculty Learning Community, we explored the "big questions" we wanted our students to take away from our mathematics courses. We called these questions the Big Ideas of the course and developed a Big Ideas Reflection Assignment, which we continue to assign at the end of each of our courses. Students are able to demonstrate understanding and application of their learning as well as their values and appreciation of mathematics. The assignment encourages students to move beyond a focus on technique and symbolic manipulations towards a broader and more holistic approach, including making connections between their learning …

Mentoring As A Statistical Educator In A Christian College, L. Marlin Eby

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2017

In this paper, I present principles based on more than thirty years of intentional mentoring as a statistical educator in a Christian college. I believe this mentoring has been enhanced due to the setting- a Christian college, and the discipline - statistics. I discuss distinctives of the Christian college setting that positively impact mentoring in any discipline with respect to the mentor, the mentee, and the pervading campus atmosphere. I focus on mentoring as a statistical educator by specifically considering the following: attracting students to the discipline of statistics, preparing students for careers using statistics, and preparing students for graduate …

The Daily Question: Building Student Trust And Interest In Undergraduate Introductory Probability And Statistics Courses, Matthew A. Hawks

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2017

Introducing probability or statistics to disinterested undergraduate students is challenging. Adding faith in such a classroom at a secular institution only increases the complexity. We share an unobtrusive way to build trust with students, creating a medium to both naturally share your faith and have your students look forward to attending each class. The context is the United States Naval Academy, a four-year undergraduate institution with an emphasis on leader development. In addition to a calculus sequence, Humanities majors enroll in Probability with Naval Applications or Introductory Statistics. These sophomores or juniors are split between those who have no intention …

The Topology Of Harry Potter: Exploring Higher Dimensions In Young Adult Fantasy Literature, Sarah Klanderman, Alexa Schut, Dave Klanderman, William Boerman-Cornell

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2017

As one of the most beloved series in children’s literature today, the Harry Potter books excite students of all ages with the adventures of living in a magical world. Magical objects (e.g., bottom-less handbags, the Knight Bus, time turners, and moving portraits) can inspire generalizations to mathematical concepts that would be relevant in an undergraduate geometry or topology course. Intuitive explanations for some of the magical objects connect to abstract mathematical ideas. We
offer a typology with a total of five categories, including Three Dimensions in Two Dimensions, Higher Dimensions in Three Dimensions, Two and Three Dimensional Movement, Higher Dimensional …

Start A Math Teacher Circle: Connect K-12 Teachers With Engaging, Approachable, And Meaningful Mahtematical Problems, Thomas Clark, Mike Janssen, Amanda Harsy, Dave Klanderman, Mandi Maxwell, Sharon Robbert

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2017

Many K-12 math teachers are not ready to teach from a conceptual and inquiry-oriented per

Ten Mathematicians Who Recognized God's Hand In Their Work (Part 2), Dale Mcintyre

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2017

Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) once observed that "Whoever is moved by faith to assent to [the Christian religion], is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience." Evidently Hume's cynical pronouncement did not apply to Descartes, Newton, Riemann, and other profound thinkers who believed God had commissioned and equipped them to glorify Him in their pursuit of truth through mathematics - And based on their extraordinary achievements the principles of their understanding do not appear …

Turaev Surfaces And Toroidally Alternating Knots, Seungwon Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, we study knots and links via their alternating diagrams on closed orientable surfaces. Every knot or link has such a diagram by a construction of Turaev, which is called the Turaev surface of the link. Links that have an alternating diagram on a torus were defined by Adams as toroidally alternating. For a toroidally alternating link, the minimal genus of its Turaev surface may be greater than one. Hence, these surfaces provide different topological measures of how far a link is from being alternating.

First, we classify link diagrams with Turaev genus one and two in terms …

Joint Laver Diamonds And Grounded Forcing Axioms, Miha Habič

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In chapter 1 a notion of independence for diamonds and Laver diamonds is investigated. A sequence of Laver diamonds for κ is joint if for any sequence of targets there is a single elementary embedding j with critical point κ such that each Laver diamond guesses its respective target via j. In the case of measurable cardinals (with similar results holding for (partially) supercompact cardinals) I show that a single Laver diamond for κ yields a joint sequence of length κ, and I give strict separation results for all larger lengths of joint sequences. Even though the principles get …

Manifold Convergence: Sewing Sequences Of Riemannian Manifolds With Positive Or Nonnegative Scalar Curvature, Jorge E. Basilio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, we develop a new method of performing surgery on 3-dimensional manifolds called "sewing" and use this technique to construct sequences of Riemannian manifolds with positive or nonnegative scalar curvature. The foundation of our method is a strengthening of the Gromov-Lawson tunnel construction which guarantees the existence of “tiny” and arbitrarily “short” tunnels. We study the limits of sequences of sewn spaces under the Gromov-Hausdorff (GH) and Sormani-Wenger Instrinsic-Flat (SWIF) distances and discuss to what extent the notion of scalar curvature extends to these spaces. We give three applications of the sewing technique to demonstrate that stability theorems …

Intercusp Geodesics And Cusp Shapes Of Fully Augmented Links, Rochy Flint

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We study the geometry of fully augmented link complements in the 3-sphere by looking at their link diagrams. We extend the method introduced by Thistlethwaite and Tsvietkova to fully augmented links and define a system of algebraic equations in terms of parameters coming from edges and crossings of the link diagrams. Combining it with the work of Purcell, we show that the solutions to these algebraic equations are related to the cusp shapes of fully augmented link complements. As an application we use the cusp shapes to study the commensurability classes of fully augmented links.

Elimination For Systems Of Algebraic Differential Equations, Richard Gustavson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We develop new upper bounds for several effective differential elimination techniques for systems of algebraic ordinary and partial differential equations. Differential elimination, also known as decoupling, is the process of eliminating a fixed subset of unknown functions from a system of differential equations in order to obtain differential algebraic consequences of the original system that do not depend on that fixed subset of unknowns. A special case of differential elimination, which we study extensively, is the question of consistency, that is, if the given system of differential equations has a solution. We first look solely at the ``algebraic data" of …

Solving Algorithmic Problems In Finitely Presented Groups Via Machine Learning, Jonathan Gryak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Machine learning and pattern recognition techniques have been successfully applied to algorithmic problems in free groups. In this dissertation, we seek to extend these techniques to finitely presented non-free groups, in particular to polycyclic and metabelian groups that are of interest to non-commutative cryptography.

As a prototypical example, we utilize supervised learning methods to construct classifiers that can solve the conjugacy decision problem, i.e., determine whether or not a pair of elements from a specified group are conjugate. The accuracies of classifiers created using decision trees, random forests, and N-tuple neural network models are evaluated for several non-free groups. …

Hypoelliptic Multiscale Langevin Diffusions: Large Deviations, Invariant Measures And Small Mass Asymptotics, Wenqing Hu, Konstantinos Spiliopoulosï

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We consider a general class of hypoelliptic Langevin diffusions and study two related questions. The first question is large deviations for hypoelliptic multiscale diffusions as the noise and the scale separation parameter go to zero. The second question is small mass asymptotics of (a) the invariant measure corresponding to the hypoelliptic Langevin operator and of (b) related hypoelliptic Poisson equations. The invariant measure corresponding to the hypoelliptic problem and appropriate hypoelliptic Poisson equations enter the large deviations rate function due to the multiscale effects. Based on the small mass asymptotics we derive that the large deviations behavior of the multiscale …

A Bad Plan Is Better Than No Plan: A Theoretical Justification Of An Empirical Observation, Songsak Sriboonchitta, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In his 2014 book "Zero to One", a software mogul Peter Thiel lists the lessons he learned from his business practice. Most of these lessons make intuitive sense, with one exception -- his observation that "a bad plan is better than no plan" seems to be counterintuitive. In this paper, we provide a possible theoretical explanation for this somewhat counterintuitive empirical observation.

Possible Explanation Of Empirical Values Of The Matern Smoothness Parameter For The Temporal Covariance Of Gps Measurements, Gaël Kermarrec, Steffen Schön, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

The measurement errors of GPS measurements are largely due to the atmosphere, and the unpredictable part of these errors are due to the unpredictable (random) atmospheric phenomena, i.e., to turbulence. Turbulence-generated measurement errors should correspond to the smoothness parameter ν = 5/6 in the Matern covariance model. Because of this, we expected the empirical values of this smoothness parameter to be close to 5/6. When we estimated ν based on measurement results, we indeed got values close to 5/6, but interestingly, all our estimates were actually close to 1 (and slightly larger than 1). In this paper, we provide a …

On Product Stability Of Asymptotic Property C, Gregory C. Bell, Andrzej Nagórko

Summer Conference on Topology and Its Applications

Asymptotic property C is a dimension-like large-scale invariant of metric spaces that is of interest when applied to spaces with infinite asymptotic dimension. It was first described by Dranishnikov, who based it on Haver's topological property C. Topological property C fails to be preserved by products in very striking ways and so a natural question that remained open for some 10+ years is whether asymptotic property C is preserved by products. Using a technique inspired by Rohm we show that asymptotic property C is preserved by direct products of metric spaces.

Domains And Probability Measures: A Topological Retrospective, Michael Mislove

Summer Conference on Topology and Its Applications

Domain theory has seen success as a semantic model for high-level programming languages, having devised a range of constructs to support various effects that arise in programming. One of the most interesting - and problematic - is probabilistic choice, which traditionally has been modeled using a domain-theoretic rendering of sub-probability measures as valuations. In this talk, I will place the domain-theoretic approach in context, by showing how it relates to the more traditional approaches such as functional analysis and set theory. In particular, we show how the topologies that arise in the classic approaches relate to the domain-theoretic rendering. We …

Extension Theorems For Large Scale Spaces Via Neighbourhood Operators, Thomas Weighill, Jerzy Dydak

Summer Conference on Topology and Its Applications

Coarse geometry is the study of the large scale behaviour of spaces. The motivation for studying such behaviour comes mainly from index theory and geometric group theory. In this talk we introduce the notion of (hybrid) large scale normality for large scale spaces and prove analogues of Urysohn’s Lemma and the Tietze Extension Theorem for spaces with this property, where continuous maps are replaced by (continuous and) slowly oscillating maps. To do so, we first prove a general form of each of these results in the context of a set equipped with a neighbourhood operator satisfying certain axioms, from which …