Mathematics Commons^™

Using Independent Bernoulli Random Variables To Model Gender Hiring Practices, Kimberly D. Hildebrand

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Gender bias is a problem in the workforce at large. In order for society to progress it is important that hiring practices do not use gender as a competitive factor. Hiring practices based on gender can be represented statistically using Bernoulli Random Variables and the Beta and Binomial distributions.Using the moment generating function (MGF) of the Bernoulli and Binomial Distributions, it is possible to calculate the expected value (mean) and variance for the number of women hires for n positions. The probability generating function (PGF) of a sample size n can be used to find the probability of hiring a …

Scientific Awareness At Ursinus College, Frank G. Devone

Mathematics Honors Papers

Ursinus College prides itself on creating well-rounded students, and recent initiatives, such as the Fellowships in the Ursinus Transition to the Undergraduate Research Experience Program and the Center for Science and the Common Good suggest that science is a vital part of the Ursinus liberal arts mission. A scientific awareness pilot survey was administered to a sample of Ursinus students drawn from the Class of 2014 and students residing at Ursinus during summer 2014. Experience and data collected from this pilot were used to create a final survey which was made available to all students at Ursinus College. The survey …

Wavelet Analysis Of Non-Stationary Signals With Applications, Maria Dorothea Van Der Walt

Dissertations

The empirical mode decomposition (EMD) algorithm, introduced by N.E. Huang et al in 1998, is arguably the most popular mathematical scheme for non-stationary signal decomposition and analysis. The objective of EMD is to separate a given signal into a number of components, called intrinsic mode functions (IMF's), after which the instantaneous frequency (IF) and amplitude of each IMF are computed through Hilbert spectral analysis (HSA). On the other hand, the synchrosqueezed wavelet transform (SST), introduced by I. Daubechies and S. Maes in 1996 and further developed by I. Daubechies, J. Lu and H.-T. Wu in 2011, is first applied to …

Mathematical Modeling And Optimal Control Of Alternative Pest Management For Alfalfa Agroecosystems, Cara Sulyok

Mathematics Honors Papers

This project develops mathematical models and computer simulations for cost-effective and environmentally-safe strategies to minimize plant damage from pests with optimal biodiversity levels. The desired goals are to identify tradeoffs between costs, impacts, and outcomes using the enemies hypothesis and polyculture in farming. A mathematical model including twelve size- and time-dependent parameters was created using a system of non-linear differential equations. It was shown to accurately fit results from open-field experiments and thus predict outcomes for scenarios not covered by these experiments.

The focus is on the application to alfalfa agroecosystems where field experiments and data were conducted and provided …

Estimation In The Exponentiated Kumaraswamy Dagum Distribution With Censored Samples, Broderick O. Oluyede, Shujiao Huang

Mathematical Sciences: Faculty Publications

In a recent note, Huang and Oluyede (2014) proposed a new model called the exponentiated Kumaraswamy Dagum (EKD) distribution with applications to income and lifetime data. In this note, this distribution is shown to be a very competitive model for describing censored observations in lifetime reliability problems. This work shows that in certain cases, the EKD distribution performs better than other parametric model such as the exponentiated Kumaraswamy Weibull distribution and its sub-models, which include some of the commonly used models in survival analysis and reliability analysis, such as the exponentiated Weibull, Weibull and exponential distributions.

Packing Densities Of Colored And Non-Colored Patterns, Matthew R. Just

GS4 Student Scholars Symposium

Pattern packing concerns finding an optimal permutation that contains the maximum number of occurrences of a given pattern and computing the corresponding packing density. In many instances such an optimal permutation can be characterized directly and the number of occurrences of the pattern in interest may be enumerated explicitly. In more complicated patterns a direct characterization may be more challenging, however computational results for long permutations can help provide an indirect characterization of the general form of an optimal permutation. Much work has been done on the study of pattern packing in layered patterns, as the optimal permutation of a …

2015 Sonia Kovalevsky Math For Girls Day Program, Association For Women In Mathematics, Lincoln University Of Missouri, Donna L. Stallings

Math for Girls Day Documents

10th Annual Lincoln University Sonia Kovalevsky Math for Girls Day program on April 24, 2015.

A Computational Study Of Icart's Function, Thomas Simmons

Honors Projects

A hash function maps some elements of a larger, initial set to elements of a smaller, resultant set. By nature, this leads to collisions and, sometimes, not all elements in the smaller set will be mapped to as a result. The set in consideration here is all points on an elliptic curve. This is a special class of curve with two variables, which takes the form here as y² = x³ + ax + b. A hash function is useful in offering a deterministic way to map an input to a pair of x and y values …

Explorations Of The Collatz Conjecture (Mod M), Glenn Micah Jackson Jr

Honors College Theses

The Collatz Conjecture is a deceptively difficult problem recently developed in mathematics. In full, the conjecture states: Begin with any positive integer and generate a sequence as follows: If a number is even, divide it by two. Else, multiply by three and add one. Repetition of this process will eventually reach the value 1. Proof or disproof of this seemingly simple conjecture have remained elusive. However, it is known that if the generated Collatz Sequence reaches a cycle other than 4, 2, 1, the conjecture is disproven. This fact has motivated our search for occurrences of 4, 2, 1, and …

Gallai-Ramsey And Vertex Proper Connection Numbers, Emily C. Chizmar

Honors College Theses

Given a complete graph G, we consider two separate scenarios. First, we consider the minimum number N such that every coloring of G using exactly k colors contains either a rainbow triangle or a monochromatic star on t vertices. This number is known for small cases and generalized for larger cases for a fixed k. Second, we introduce the vertex proper connection number of a graph and provide a relationship to the chromatic number of minimally connected subgraphs. Also a notion of total proper connection is introduced and a question is asked about a possible relationship between the total proper …

Fostoria Intermediate Elementary School Family Math Night, Chelsea Nye

Honors Projects

This is a Family Math Night that was planned and held at Fostoria Intermediate Elementary School in Fostoria, Ohio. It includes the Research Questions, Literature Review, Proposed Activity, Methodology, and Expected Results as well as the Annotated Bibliography and Timeline for Completion from my research and planning. Following the Proposal are 20 mathematical activity or game lesson plans and direction sheets that were planned for the Family Math Night. There are 5 different mathematical activities or games for each grade level 3-6, each meeting a different domain in the Common Core State Standards. At the end there is two general …

Multidecompositions Of Complete Graphs Into A Graph Pair Of Order 6, Yizhe Gao, Mark Daniel Roberts, Faculty Advisor

John Wesley Powell Student Research Conference

A graph is a mathematical structure consisting of a set of objects called vertices and a set of 2-element subsets of vertices, called edges. The complete graph on n vertices is the graph with n vertices and an edge between any pair of distinct vertices. Let C₆ denote the cycle on 6 vertices. We are interested in partitioning the edges of the complete graph on n vertices into copies of C₆ and its complement with at least one copy of each graph. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions on n for the existence such a structure.

Hurwitz Monodromy And Full Number Fields, David P. Roberts, Akshay Venkatesh

Mathematics Publications

We give conditions for the monodromy group of a Hurwitz space over the configuration space of branch points to be the full alternating or symmetric group on the degree. Specializing the resulting coverings suggests the existence of many number fields with surprisingly little ramification —for example, the existence of infinitely many A_m or S_m number fields unramified away from {2,3,5}.

Euler's Multiple Solutions To A Diophantine Problem, Christopher D. Goff

College of the Pacific Faculty Presentations

No abstract provided.

Solving Ordinary Differential Equations Using Differential Forms And Lie Groups, Richard M. Shumate

Senior Honors Theses

Differential equations have bearing on practically every scientific field. Though they are prevalent in nature, they can be challenging to solve. Most of the work done in differential equations is dependent on the use of many methods to solve particular types of equations. Sophus Lie proposed a modern method of solving ordinary differential equations in the 19th century along with a coordinate free variation of finding the infinitesimal generator by combining the influential work of Élie Cartan among others in the field of differential geometry. The driving idea behind using symmetries to solve differential equations is that there exists a …

How Visualization Can Improve The Understanding Of Mathematics, Mariah Martin

Undergraduate Research Conference

High school students have a difficult time taking the new End-Of-Course exams in math. Why are students having this difficulty? This could be because students lack the understanding of visualization in mathematics. Visualization can be helpful to certain students who think this way, while also confusing to those same students, and others as well. However, to what extent do high stakes tests, such as the End-Of-Course exams in Algebra I and II, incorporate mathematical visualization? How can visualization help improve the understanding of mathematics? This review will explain the advantages and disadvantages of incorporating visualization in these exams, how students …

Analysis Of Accounting Wages Within The Largest Cities Of Texas, Zuleima Espino, Delyla Frederick, Allyson Gallier, Halee Morehead

Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Construction Of Spline Type Orthogonal Scaling Functions And Wavelets, Tung Nguyen

Honors Projects

In this paper, we present a method to construct orthogonal spline-type scaling functions by using B-spline functions. B-splines have many useful properties such as compactly supported and refinable properties. However, except for the case of order one, B-splines of order greater than one are not orthogonal. To induce the orthogonality while keeping the above properties of B-splines, we multiply a class of polynomial function factors to the masks of the B-splines so that they become the masks of a spline-type orthogonal compactly-supported and refinable scaling functions in L₂. In this paper we establish the existence of this class …

Discovering Geometric And Topological Properties Of Ellipsoids By Curvatures, Lina Wu, Shihshu Walter Wei, Jia Liu, Ye Li

Publications and Research

Aims/ Objectives: We are interested in discovering the geometric, topological and physical properties of ellipsoids by analyzing curvature properties on ellipsoids. We begin with studying ellipsoids as a starting point. Our aim is to find a way to study geometric, topological and physical properties from the analytic curvature properties for convex hyper-surfaces in the general setting.

Study Design: Multiple-discipline study between Differential Geometry, Topology and Mathematical Physics.

Place and Duration of Study: Department of Mathematics (Borough of Manhattan Community College-The City University of New York), Department of Mathematics (University of Oklahoma), Department of Mathematics and Statistics (University of West Florida), …

Primes And Zeros: A Million Dollar Mystery, Brian Conrey

Dalrymple Lecture Series

A prime number is an integer greater than one whose only positive divisors are 1 and itself. In 1859 G. F. B. Riemann proposed a way to understand how the prime numbers are distributed among the natural numbers. More than 150 years later mathematicians still have not proven Riemann's Hypothesis. The stature of this problem has continued to rise so that today it is widely regarded as the most important unsolved problem in all of mathematics. In this talk I will describe some of the colorful history that surrounds this question.