Assistant professor of mathematics Chad Awtrey and mathematics majors Nicole Miles '15, Chris Shill '14 and Honors Fellow Erin Strosnider '14 published a research article in a recent issue (Volume 8, no. 2) of the journal Involve.
Involve is a professionally-refereed journal that publishes high-quality research results obtained by students and their mentors.
The Elon research team’s publication, “Degree 14 2-adic fields,” contains theory and computational techniques they developed for cataloguing fundamental properties of degree 14 polynomials whose coefficients are 2-adic numbers.
This work is part of Awtrey’s larger research program which aims to chart the arithmetic landscape of properties of polynomials with p-adic coefficients. The purpose of such research is to support computational attacks on several of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics, many of which have remained unsolved for several hundred years.