Math students impress on international stage

Two fourth-year mathematics students recently represented Nipissing very well at the 91st Annual Meeting of Mathematics Association of America South East, held March 9 – 10 at Clayton State University, in Atlanta, Georgia.Students Laura Huntington and Ian Kelly contributed a talk, paper and poster at the conference, and were accompanied by professor, Dr. Tzvetalin Vassilev.  Huntington’s talk was titled Minimizing the Atom Bond Connectivity Index of Chemical Trees.  Kelly’s poster was titled Fourier Series, and Vassilev’s talk was titled Visibility: Finding the Staircase Kernel in Orthogonal Polygons, which was co-authored with fourth-year student Stefen Pape (who chose not to attend).
The selection of these students to present at the conference is an accomplishment in itself.  The selection process is very competitive. The conference is one of the largest meetings of its kind. This year, over 200 undergraduate students participated. There were only 23 undergraduate posters accepted, 42 undergraduate papers, and 120 contributed papers presented.
In addition to presenting their work, Huntington and Kelly also represented Nipissing University in Math Jeopardy. Despite being a team of only two, competing against teams of four, the dynamic duo for Nipissing narrowly missed qualification for the final, coming second in their match. They received many compliments for their participation and were noteworthy for being the first ever international participants.
Speaking to the quality of their work, Huntington’s paper was initially accepted as a contributed paper, before it was noted that she is a student. Further, both Huntington’s paper and Pape’s paper are already accepted for publication in Applied Mathematics and American Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, respectively.
Both Huntington and Kelly received funding to attend this conference from the Nipissing University Faculty Association Learning Opportunity Award, and from Dr. Vassilev’s Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant.