Senior projects

Possible projects

I am not accepting senior project students at this time.

Current projects

Holly Crider, Predicting the future
Chelsey Poettker, Coloring theorems and their generalization

Past projects

• Paul Michael Antonacci. ``Vanishing mean curvature and related properties.''January 2009.
• Elizabeth Schaab.``Finding bounds for the number of Sudoku squares.''July 2008.
• Anthony Scoles. ``An investigation of closed geodesics on regular polyhedra.'' May 2008.
• Glenn Harris. ``Billiards in polygons using unfoldings.'' April 2007.
• Meagan Heckert. ``Understanding special Sudoku solutions through geometry and error correcting codes.'' April 2007.

Guidelines for writing senior projects with me

Please note that these are not necessarily departmental rules, but are simply some of the things that I like to see. I encourage others (especially students) to suggest additions to this list!

• Your project must be typed with a program capable of typesetting professional looking mathematics. I strongly prefer simply learning and writing in LaTeX (link to come with lots of good LaTeX info). You may also use Scientific Workplace, which is available on campus. However, I don't know how to use Scientific Workplace, and so I can't help you much with that. Some specific typesetting information:
  • Equations should be numbered only if you are going to refer to them later.
  • All pages, except for the first page, should get a page number.
  • Citations should use the format seen in Scoles' paper (fix link). In LaTeX, this is accomplished with the alpha bib style.
  • Sentences should not begin with a variable.
  • It is difficult to decide what to call oneself in a mathematical paper. Although perhaps not acceptable in an English class, it is common to refer to yourself as ``we'' in a math paper. (We sometimes call this usage the ``royal we''.)
• Write for your peers (or only slighly above the level of your peers). The professors reading your paper will not all be experts in your field, so you should strive to explain yourself very clearly.
• Taking a graphic off the web without citing it is stealing and plagiarism. I much prefer that you create your own graphics, but this is sometimes not feasible. Cite, cite cite!
• Web sources are OK only as a very last resort. I will happily teach you how to find mathematics resources that are books or journals (and thus have been at least somewhat vetted by the mathematical community). The web is a wonderful place to start, but you need to verify and cite all information using more durable media.