Math faculty attend, present at Joint Math Meetings in Baltimore

Professors Crista Arangala and Jeff Clark, Associate Professors Chad Awtrey and Karen Yokely, and Assistant Professors Kristen Mazur and Aaron Trocki attended the Joint Mathematics Meetings – the largest annual math conference in the world – in Baltimore, Maryland, on Jan. 16-19, 2019.

Clark attended a Section Officers Meeting in his role as chair of the Southeastern Section of the Mathematical Association of America. In his role as chair of the MAA's Committee on Minicourses he also chaired a meeting of that committee and attended a meeting of the MAA's Council on Meetings and Professional Development, in addition to serving as a monitor for three minicourse sessions.

Yokley was invited to the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Education Committee meeting to provide an update on the establishment of the Math Modeling Hub (MMHub). The MMHub is virtual space for both community and resources to support mathematical modeling at all levels from pre-kindergarten through college. Yokley has worked as a part of the MMHub Steering Committee for the past two years and has recently become a part of the NCTM/SIAM/COMAP Joint Committee on Modeling across the Curriculum.

Arangala, Awtrey and Trocki each delivered oral presentations. Arangala's talk, "Teaching  Linear Algebra with Matlab Apps." featured Matlab apps published on MathWorks File Exchange that can use used to enhance the Inquiry Based Learning experience in the classroom. Trocki presented research conducted in collaboration with math major Ryan Bernardi '19. In his talk, "Assessing Student Engagement and Responsibility through Inquiry-Based Learning", Trocki shared findings on student perceptions of incorporating inquiry-based learning strategies in an Applied Calculus course.

Awtrey presented his research talk "On Galois p-adic fields of p-power degree", which was joint work with Peter Komlofske '19, Christian Reese '18 and Janae Williams '18. He discussed a classification of all Eisenstein polynomials with p-adic coefficients whose symmetries correspond to the rotations of a polygon with p, p^2, or p^3 sides; where p is an odd prime number. A corresponding paper has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Algebra, Number Theory, and Applications.

Awtrey also presented his research talk "On Galois groups of doubly even octic polynomials", which was joint work with Kiley Shannon '18 and Williams High School students Sam Cryan, Anna Altmann and Madeleine Touchette. Considering polynomials of the form x^8+ax^4+b, this work presents theoretical results that describe the symmetries of said polynomials given only minimal information on the coefficients. A corresponding paper has been accepted for publication in the  Journal of Algebra and Its Applications.