2002: Professor Smith funded a team of four students to research problems in
combinatorics under the direction of Assistant Professor
Mark Skandera,
now at Dartmouth College.
2000:
Maggie Peters investigated applications of
linear algebra to building effective internet search engines,
and also to analyzing voting patterns in the United Nations. Maggie is now a PhD student in political science at Stanford.
1999:
Betseygail Rand conducted research with Professor
Smith on sparse matrices. The project was assisted by (then) PhD student
Amanda Johnson. The goal is to find matrices with as many
zero entries as possible which still have many non-zero sub-determinants.
As the number of non-zero determinants increases, so must the number of
non-zero entries. How can one describe this function?
This has applications to finding sparse systems of parameters
for projective algebraic varieties.
After Michigan,
Betseygail completed a PhD in mathematics at University of Texas, and is now a professor at Texas Lutheran University.
For more information on undergraduate research opportunities,
see Christine Betz in the Math Office, East Hall 2084