The Senior Program

Mathematics majors begin the senior year with a senior seminar. These small seminars focus on different areas of mathematics and are devoted largely to presentations by students and intensive discussion. Then, in the spring semester, students may elect to write a thesis, working independently but under close faculty supervision. The senior thesis is a culmination of each student's undergraduate experience; it synthesizes coursework, research and discussion into a focused statement of intellectual growth and insight. Strong student papers sometimes are published in scholarly journals — a remarkable accomplishment at the undergraduate level.

Honors Presentations

• Understanding Voting Behavior
• Infinitesimals in Non-Archimedean Fields
• Tackling the Issue of Influence: Ranking Linebackers with K-Mean Clustering
• How to Find a Julia Set
• The Effect of Operations on the Deficiency of Chemical Reaction Networks
• Finding the Spreading Speed for Fisher-KPP Equations in Shifting Habitats
• Edge Determining Sets and Determining Index
• Parking Functions, Bond Lattices, and Unimodal Forests

Recent projects in mathematics include:

• Quasi Local Energy for Constantly Accelerating Observers in Static Black Holes Space Times
• Quandle Coloring Invariant for Knots and Links
• Asymptotic Expansions of the Voigt Functions
• Matrices with Dominant Diagonals
• RNA foldings, oriented stuck knots, and state sum invariants
• Non-Measurable Sets
• Eigenvalues of Operators on Infinite-Dimensional Spaces