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.
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 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, 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, 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.
