Recent graduates Chris Shill '14 and Erin Strosnider '14 each co-authored an article with Assistant Professor Chad Awtrey in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics based on research conducted during the 2013-2014 academic year.
Shill’s article, “Absolute Resolvents and Masses of Irreducible Quintic Polynomials,” detailed new techniques for determining symmetries of roots of polynomials of degree 5. Shill’s work extends and improves previous research in this area, including work done by Elon math majors Brett Barkley ’15, Jeremy Guinn ’14 and Mackenzie McCraw ’14, whose research on degree 4 polynomials was published earlier this year in the Pi Mu Epsilon Journal.
Strosnider’s article, “A Linear Resolvent for Degree 14 Polynomials,” describes her methods for completely classifying all degree 14 extensions of the 7-adic numbers. This work, along with her previous research on degree 14 polynomials with 2-adic coefficients, comprised Strosnider’s honors thesis. The paper on the 2-adic case has been accepted for publication in the journal Involve and will be published in the near future.
Currently, Shill is pursuing his doctorate in physics at UNC Chapel Hill, and Strosnider is working at the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University.