Math students excel at national conferences

Senior Aja Johnson’s reserach won an award of merit in the undergraduate poster section at the annual joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), one of the largest meetings of mathematicians in the world. Her poster on the disconnectivity of leximorphic spaces earned a cash-endowed award of merit at the conference.

Johnson, whose work was mentored by mathematics faculty members Todd Lee and Crista Coles, is studying in the Mathematics in Budapest program this spring. She also conducted research as a sophomore under Lee and Coles which resulted in a paper that has been accepted by the Pi Mu Epsilon Journal.

Three other students mentored by Lee and Coles have presented their research at a recent meeting of the Southeastern section of the MAA. Bri Yoho presented her work on the existence of solutions to graph states’ problems and Cheryl Borden presented her work on clustering versions of a North American tribal tale. In a professional session, Ryan Barnard presented his various results from the study of the erroneous use of the wolf/shark cellular automata as a simulation for a Lotka-Volterra system.