Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics

The following is just a sample of the many successful undergraduate mathematics research stories of students at Penn State.

• George Andrews
  • For her semester project in the 2001 MASS course on partitions, Sharon (Chuba) Garthwaite wrote a paper on partitions using the software package Omega. Subsequently, at the joint AMS-MAA meeting in San Diego in January 2002, she was judged a winner in the Undergraduate Student Poster Session for her poster displaying this project.  Garthwaite has since earned her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin under the direction of Ken Ono and is a tenure-track faculty member at Bucknell University.  
  • Beth Morgan (2003) and Frannie Worek (2006) wrote their honors theses on projects which began either in the REU or MASS programs at Penn State.
• Andrew Belmonte
  • Benjamin Akers worked on impact, splashes, and non-Newtonian free surfaces and published a paper in the Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics in 2006.
  • Sharon (Chuba) Garthwaite presented at the 4th Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics in 2002.  Garthwaite has since earned her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin under the direction of Ken Ono and is a tenure-track faculty member at Bucknell University.  
  • Shaden T. Eldakar worked on instabilites of a hanging chain and published a paper in Physical Review Letters in 2001.
  • Andrea Young presented at the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics, APS in 2000 and at the 3rd Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics in 2001.
  • Megan C. O'Connell published a paper in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics in 2000 on the topic of membrane-fixed catalysts in chemical reaction diffusion systems.
• Diane Henderson
  • Dana Pfeiff recently worked in the Pritchard Lab on the damping of nonlinear, surface water waves. She presented a paper at The Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Math in February 2003 and co-authored the following paper: Segur, H., Henderson, D., Carter, J., Hammack, J., Li, C-M., Pheiff, D., Socha, K., Stabilizing the Benfamin-Feir instability, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 539 (2005), 229-271.
  • Ming Yi worked in the Pritchard lab during the summer after high school graduation at State College High School. Her research topic was the collisions of solitons. She co-authored the following paper: Hammack, J. L., Henderson, D. M., Guyenne, P., Yi, M., Solitary-Wave Collisions, Proceedings of ASME Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering: A Symposium to honor Theodore Yao-Tsu Wu, World Scientific Publishers (2004).
• James Sellers
  • Kevin Courtright (B.S., mathematics, '04) worked with James Sellers on two separate projects in the theory of partitions. As a result, two separate papers were co-authored by Kevin and Dr. Sellers and were published in the journals INTEGERS and Annals of Combinatorics respectively. The papers can be seen at Dr. Sellers' website: http://www.math.psu.edu/sellersj/papers.htm
  • During the 2006-2007 academic year, James Sellers is working with five first-year undergraduates on a variety of problems in combinatorics. Based on their results, the students plan to present at least three separate talks at the 2007 Conference on Undergraduate Research in Mathematics to be hosted at Penn State in November.
• Bob Vaughan
  • After attending the MASS program, student Kevin Weiss co-authored a paper with Bob Vaughan entitled ''On sigma-phi numbers'' which was published in Mathematika, volume 48 (2001).

Do you want to become part of a research success story here at Penn State? Contact us at curm@math.psu.edu to learn more about how to get that story started!