Applied Mathematics News

The Stevenson University Beach Volleyball team finished the 2019 season with an 11-11 record overall. Beach volleyball is the fastest growing sport in women’s NCAA history, and Stevenson was the first Division III school in the country to sponsor the sport. In our department, we’re proud of our Applied Math majors who are part of the team- Katie Leftridge, Darian Hileman and Caroline Dangel are three of the ten team members!

Members of the Math Department and the Academic Link presented at the recent Maryland College Learning Center Association Annual Conference. Dr. Ellen Roskes (left), Department Chair, and Kevin Knudsen (right), Link Director, discussed how they worked together to develop a Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) Program. The students, Olivia Apicella (left center) and Courtney Hohn, Applied Math senior, shared their impressions as PAL Student Leaders in the program. Courtney, a PAL Student Leader for Precalculus, shared how students feel comfortable asking her questions on the course material and how she can help them with understanding the work and completing the problems.

Dr. Benjamin Wilson and Applied Mathematics Junior, Evan Williams, attended the Spring 2019 conference of the MD-DC-VA section of the Mathematics Association of America in Frederick, MD cohosted by Hood College and Frederick Community College. Evan presented a poster on his and Dr. Wilson’s work from summer 2018 titled, “Around the World in 239 Translations: Computing the Entropy of Written Language Using the Bible.” The research examined the complexity of 239 different languages by computing quantities like entropy based on n-gram frequencies in translations of the Bible in each language. At the conference they also attended talks by students and faculty from other schools in the section.

This semester, Applied Mathematics majors Jess Rega (’19) and Alayna Roesener (’20) are doing research with math faculty Dr. Benjamin Wilson working in the field of sabermetrics, the study of baseball analytics. Their research involves learning to work with the computing tool R which is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics​. At the start of the semester they were working with data from major league baseball, but now that Stevenson’s baseball season is under way, they have started analyzing statistics from our own Mustang’s baseball team. In collaboration with the baseball coaching staff they are collecting and analyzing data on all aspects of the game including batting, pitching, and fielding. Jess and Alayna are both Stevenson athletes on the track team and soccer team, respectively, so this is a great project combining their interests in sports and mathematics. They hope their analysis will lead to success on the field for Stevenson baseball.

Last week, it was announced that Karen Uhlenbeck is the winner of Norway’s Abel Prize — often called the Nobel Prize of Math. She is the first woman to win this award. The Norwegian academy said it recognized Uhlenbeck “for her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics.” At SU, we are excited to celebrate our female math faculty members and students!