Applied Mathematics News

Applied Math senior, Emily Ringenbach, interned at Lockheed Martin. Her capstone paper was about the effects of the United States PATRIOT Act on private cyber security. The PATRIOT Act, which was passed as a response to the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001, gives federal and local law enforcement agencies the ability to preemptively prevent terrorist attacks. Emily examined the many opposing positions on whether or not the PATRIOT Act is an invasion of personal privacy. While she thought the regulations put in the PATRIOT Act are a good safety blanket for the United States, she recommended that the regulations present in the PATRIOT Act should be decreased.

For her Capstone, senior Sarah Modzelewski, was an intern in the Risk Department at OneMain Financial, a subprime lender offering personal loans. Her capstone project focused on discrimination in the loan industry. She studied the process by which the government determines whether or not lenders are discriminating against applicants based on factors such as the person’s age, race, religion, and gender. Sarah made recommendations on improving the process of determining if discrimination is occurring since many studies she examined showed that lenders are often discriminatory.

Several math faculty members cheered at SU’s Ice Hockey game on Saturday in honor of goalie Sarah Modzelewski, an applied math senior. It was an amazing game with a 4-0 victory during which Sarah stopped 10 shots on the goal! Go Mustangs!

At the Joint Mathematics Meeting, Dr. Mark Branson and his research students, Robert Chen (top picture) and Malik Naanaa, presented their research on the geometry of Baltimore’s public transportation system during the Freddie Gray protests last year . During last summer, they built a model of the city’s transit system on a normal day and on the day of the protests, and used that model to analyze how the geometry changed. Then they presented their work this January at the conference in Seattle, Washington.