Tag: Department of Mathematics

Keith Mellinger, associate professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics, together with a colleague from Kean University in N.J., recently published “The Spider and the Fly” in the College Mathematics Journal, a publication of the Mathematical Association of America.

The Spider and the Fly puzzle, originally attributed to the great puzzler Henry Ernest Dudeney, and now over 100 years old, asks for the shortest path between two points on a particular square prism. The authors explore a generalization, find that the original solution only holds in certain cases, and suggest how this discovery might be used in the classroom.

Yuan-Jen Chiang, professor of mathematics, has a research article “Some Properties of Biwave Maps”  published in the April issue of the Journal of Geometry and Physics.

The article was presented at the recent International Congress of Mathematicians, held every four years, in Hyderabad, India. She also presented a research paper “Biwave Maps, Stability and Conservation Law” at the 5th International Conference on Mathematics and Statistics in Athens, Greece.

Janusz Konieczny, professor of mathematics, has published a letter to the editors, Are Financial Jobs Morally Unjustifiable?, in the journal Mathematical Intelligencer.

Dr. Julius Esunge, assistant professor of mathematics, recently organized a session at the national Joint Mathematics Meetings held in Boston, Mass., in January. His session, titled “Stochastic Analysis in Honor of Professor Hui-Hsiung Kuo” ran for two concurrent days and brought in about 20 speakers from around the world.

Dr. Debra Hydorn, professor of mathematics, delivered a presentation titled Fostering Artistic

Explorations with Geometer’s Sketchpad in a session on Arts and Mathematics at the conference. In addition, Dr. Hydorn had a piece of art selected for display at the Joint Meetings.  A video about the art exhibit was made to showcase the event.

Dr. Jangwoon “Leo” Lee, assistant professor of mathematics, delivered the presentation Galerkin Finite Element Approximations of an Optimal Control Problem for Elliptic PDEs with Random Input Data, in a session on Numerical Analysis at the conference.  Dr. Lee also served as a judge for the national undergraduate student poster competition at the same meeting.

In addition, five majors in the Department of Mathematics presented results of their research projects at the meeting.

Ryan Vaughn, mentored by Dr. Randall Helmstutler, along with Katie Dillinger and Rebecca Pressor mentored by Dr. Leo Lee presented posters that detail their work as part of the national undergraduate student poster competition.

Additionally, Catherine O’Doherty and Marianne Dubinsky, mentored by Dr. Julius Esunge, delivered presentations on their research.  Each of the projects extends work initiated as part of the Jepson Summer Science Institute from summer 2011.

Janusz Konieczny, professor of mathematics, has published a research article, A proof of Devadze’s theorem on generators of the semigroup of Boolean matrices, in the journal Semigroup Forum.