Keith Mellinger, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics, recently saw his co-authored research article Embedding cycles in finite planes published in the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. The article addresses graph cycles in planes, a topic that has been connected to certain soft-decision decoding algorithms for error-correcting codes.
Keith Mellinger Presents at Meetings
Keith Mellinger, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics, recently traveled to two conferences to present various results of his research. First, was the 2nd Annual Conference for the Exchange of Mathematical Ideas, a conference he helped to organize, held at the University of Northern Iowa. There he spoke about Blocking Semiovals and Their Applications to Cryptography. He also traveled to London, England, for the 24th British Combinatorial Conference where he delivered the presentation titled Minimal Kakeya Sets.
Keith Mellinger Presents on Math & Music
Associate Professor and Chair of Mathematics Keith Mellinger recently attended the Mathematical Association of America‘s regional meeting held at Salisbury University. At the meeting, Mellinger presented Eigentriads – a musical offering in which he discussed eigenvectors, a topic found in any undergraduate course in linear algebra, and an amusing relationship they have with diminished and augmented triads.
Keith Mellinger Publishes Research Article
Keith Mellinger, associate professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics, saw his co-authored article “Blocking semiovals containing conics” published in the January 2013 issue of Advances in Geometry. The article addresses the construction of blocking semiovals, a mathematical object that finds application in areas of modern cryptology and the design of experiments.
Keith Mellinger Publishes Research Article
Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics Keith Mellinger recently had his article “The de Bruijn–Erdős theorem for hypergraphs” published in the journal Designs, Codes and Cryptography. The article was co-authored with mathematicians from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of California in San Diego, and Tel Aviv University, Israel.
Keith Mellinger Publishes Research Article
Keith E. Mellinger, associate professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics, co-authored the article “Generalized Pellegrino caps ” which appears in the most recent issue of the journal Finite Fields and Their Applications. The journal publishes papers in various applications of finite fields including algebraic coding theory, cryptology, combinatorial design theory, pseudorandom number generation and linear recurring sequences.
Keith Mellinger Publishes in Innovations in Incidence Geometry
Keith Mellinger, associate professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics, saw his co-authored article “Semiovals from Unions of Conics” published in the most recent issue of Innovations in Incidence Geometry. The article completely characterizes certain types of semiovals, special structures in finite geometries that find application as cryptologic keys.
Mellinger presented part of this work as an invited speaker at the 14th annual Discrete Math Days conference in Fort Collins, Colo.
Keith Mellinger Publishes in College Mathematics Journal
Keith Mellinger
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.
Keith Mellinger Published in “Discrete Mathematics”
Keith Mellinger, associate professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics, had his article “Spreads, arcs, and multiple wavelength codes” published in the journal Discrete Mathematics. In addition, he presented the talk “Blocking Semiovals and Cryptology” as an invited speaker at the Combinatorics, Algebra and Geometry Seminar at George Mason University in November.
Mathematics Students Present at Regional Meeting
Three UMW students presented results of their research projects at the fall regional meeting of the Mathematical Association of America held at Christopher Newport University in November. Catherine O’Doherty presented “Explanation of the Matrix Exponential,” a work based on her project under the direction of Dr. Julius Esunge. Ryan Vaughn’s presentation, titled “On the Contractibility of Finite coH-Spaces” extends his work with Dr. Randall Helmstutler which began during the Summer Science Institute of 2011. Finally, Kelly Scott presented “Anti-Blocking Sets” based on her honors project currently in progress under the direction of Dr. Keith Mellinger.