WOMEN IN MATH - FUND FOR UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH
Current Recipients

2007-2008 Recipients

1. Paige Elizabeth Pfeffer, Junior, Superviser: Jenny Li.
   Title: Optimization problems arising from economics and finance
   Description: Economics and finance are concerned with decisions making, i.e. making a choice among alternatives in a way to maximize or minimize something. For example, a company wants to maximize their profit while minimizing cost with consumers maximizing there utility (represents happiness) and financial intermediaries maximizing their investment returns. The corresponding mathematical model can be an optimization problem with many variables; stochastic and dynamic with equality or inequality constraints. Professor Jenny Li and I are going to investigate a particular problem arising from a banking firm model from economics.
2. Amber L. Reardon, Junior, Superviser: Alexei Novikov.
   Title: Front propagation in reaction-diffusion equations
   Description: The objective of this project is to understand the behavior of solutions of the reaction-diffusion equations. The project comprises two parts: rigorous analytical study of the Kolmogorov-Petrovsky-Piskunov-Fisher equations and numerical simulations of reaction-diffusion equations in 1-dimensional heterogeneous media using MATLAB.