The Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics (CURM) awarded a mini-grant in the amount of $11,850 to Dr. Koch in April 2009.  This grant provides a stipend of $3300 each to Jennifer Jordan and Ariel Kramer to work as a team during the summer and fall.  In addition to working full-time this past summer, Jennifer and Ariel will work for ten hours a week during the semester and present their work at the CURM Spring Research Conference at Brigham Young University.  Additionally, the grant provides support for Dr. Koch to receive a course release and to travel to Utah for a summer workshop with other CURM mini-grant recipients as well as to the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco.  The grant will allow Ariel and Jennifer to experience collaborative, interdisciplinary research in a way that reflects how applied mathematicians actually do research.  With an acceptance rate of approximately twenty percent, it is an honor for members of the Goucher community to receive CURM’s support. 

Jennifer Jordan received an American Mathematical Society/American Statistical Association award for her presentation at MathFest.  This project is a continuation of the work completed Jordan Yoder ‘09 during the summer of 2007, for which he won the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics Award for Applied Mathematics Award.  Jordan and Jennifer collaborated on the project during the spring 2009 semester as an independent study.  The presentation of national awards to two mathematics majors for an original research project serves as a tribute to the talented students that participate in Goucher College’s Summer Science Research Program.

On August 6 and 7, 2009, Jennifer Jordan ‘11 and Ariel Kramer ‘11 presented their work entitled “Follow the Food Feeding Function: A Biomathematical Study of Gastric Emptying” at MathFest, the national summer meeting of the Mathematical Association of America in Portland, Oregon.  Ariel and Jennifer conducted the research under the guidance of Dr. Gretchen A. Koch, Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science.  Ariel presented the first part of the talk in the MAA Student Paper Sessions, while Jennifer’s presentation occurred as part of the Pi Mu Epsilon Student Paper Sessions.  Both women previously presented their work during the Summer Science Program presentations at Goucher College and at the Landmark Conference at Susquehanna University.  The abstract for their talks is:

Through an examination of the mechanisms driving gastric motility, absorption, and transit, and using differential equations, we created a compartmental model of the digestion system.  Specifically, we seek to understand the process of gastric emptying by modeling the interactions between ingested solids, liquids, and chyme.  To make the model accurate biologically, we introduced randomness into the system; additionally, the nonlinearity and number of the parameters in the model make finding analytical solutions impractical.  Thus, we created numerical simulations of the model.  As this research is at the crossroads of biology and mathematics, both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the simulations will be discussed.

Check out a new website “When will I use Math?”

http://WhenWillIUseMath.com

 

A team of three Goucher students are competing on Saturday, October 25, in IBM’s 33rd Annual Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest, known colloquially as the “Battle of the Brains,” at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Under the leadership of Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science Thomas Kelliher, Goucher students Dave Gage, Melissa Mento, and Jon Simon will have to solve eight complex programming problems on one computer in five hours.

The teammates will collaborate to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds, and build software systems that solve the problems with little guidance from the judges.

Goucher’s team will compete against teams from five other schools in the region, including Johns Hopkins and Virginia Commonwealth University.

The team that solves the most problems correctly in the least amount of time will win a spot to compete in the world finals in Stockholm, Sweden.

Goucher has participated in the competition for more than 12 years and has won several honorable mentions.

For more information about the regional competitions, go online to http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/. To learn more about the contest, visit www.ibm.com/university/acmcontest/. Check out podcasts about the competitions at battleofthebrains.podbean.com.

The winter department newsletter is now available. If you are interested in receiving this newsletter for our former majors and minors, please send an email to span.macs AT goucher.edu and provide us with your name, Goucher name (if different), major, and year of graduation. We would love to hear from all our former students!

Jordan Yoder won the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics Award for his talk at MathFest in San Jose this past August. His talk on his summer research was entitled “What do monosaccharides, lipids, and amino acids have to do with mathematics?”. The SIAM award is presented to students who give outstanding talks about applied mathematics.

Congratulations Jordan!

Professor McKibben and long-time colleague/mentor Dr. David Keck continued their 5-year study of stochastic evolution equations this summer by tackling a new direction, namely stochastic differential game theory. Simply put, problems in this area are extensions of the well-known “cat and mouse” pursuit-evasion schemes, childhood game of tag, and jet-to-jet dogfighting. The progress made this summer will be presented at various conferences this year. Recent work in this direction has been published in Stochastic Analysis and Applications, and Nonlinear Analysis.

See Professor McKibbens’s website for details.

The first department newsletter is now available.

Newsletter Summer 2007