DU + MathFest = Awards

Front row: Professor Matthew Neal, Nathan Zakahi ’12, Mary Kimberly ’11, Erica Evans ’11, Yige Li ’12, Beidi Qiang ’12. Back row: Jacob Shapiro ’10, Professor Lew Ludwig, Joe Paat ’11, Bryce Pisoke ’11, and Neal Barcelo ’11.

Not too long ago, 10 Denison students headed to Pittsburgh for MathFest 2010, a national conference for numbers junkies. They walked away with five awards for their presentations. That’s a 50 percent success rate, at least according to our calculations.

The winners and their presentations:

• Mary Kimberly ’11 of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, “A Combinatorial Exploration of a Kostka Matrix Identity”
• Jacob Shapiro ’10 of Xenia, Ohio, “Knot Mosaics and Mosaic Number”
• Nathaniel Zakahi ’12 of Mankato, Minn., “Norm Characterizations of Operator Algebras”

Two others won a Pi Mu Epsilon Speaker Award (Pi Mu Epsilon is a national mathematics honorary):

• Erica Evans ’11 of Worthington, Ohio, “Knot mosaics: Results and open questions”
• Joe Paat ’11 of Rochester, Minn., “Putting numbers on the board: Enumeration of knot mosaics”