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W&M Math Students and Professors at the 2016 Joint Mathematics Meeting in Seattle

  • Joint meeting poster session    
  • W&M Math students and faculty members in JMM    
  • Greg Tayloy, Evan Dienstman, Maggie Swift and Chaoran Wei    
  • Michael Kopreski's poster was selected as one of outstanding posters    
  • Martin Salgado-Flores    
  • Fangyi Xu    
  • Liam Bench    
  • Chaoran Wei gave an invited talk    
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A team of undergraduate students and faculty members in the Department of Mathematics attended and presented at the 2016 Joint Mathematics Meeting (JMM) in Seattle, Washington.  The JMM is an mathematics conference hosted annually in early January by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). Frequently, several other national mathematics organizations also participate. The meeting is the largest gathering of mathematicians in the United States (also in the world), with several thousand talks, panels, minicourses, and poster sessions each year.

Chaoran Wei '16 presented “Image Classification of Plankton Data Using Convolutional Neural Networks” in the AMS Special Session on Data-Intensive Modeling in Ecology as an invited talk. His co-authors are Nadia Aly (student), Daniel McGibney (faculty), Daniel Vasiliu (faculty). Maggie Swift '17 presented her joint work with Junping Shi (faculty) and Leah Shaw (applied science faculty) “Dispersal-Induced Global Extinction in Two-Patch Model under the Allee Effect” in the MAA General Contributed Paper Session on Modeling and Applications.

Two students presented their work in the AMS Session on Undergraduate Research. Gregory Taylor '17 presented his joint work with Chi-Kwong Li (faculty) and Diane Pelejo (graduate student) “Polynomial Functions Over Z_n”; and Evan Dienstman '17 presented “Using statistical measurements to accurately predict septic events in premature infants”, and his adviser is John Delos (Physics faculty).

Four students presented their work in the MAA Undergraduate Student Poster Session, which showcases more than 300 projects, and each participating poster is judged by professional mathematicians on the judging panel. The titles and presenters are: “Computing all isolated invariant sets at a fixed resolution”, Martin Salgado-Flores (adviser: Sarah Day); “Relaxed coloring of sparse graphs”, Michael Kopreski (adviser: Gexin Yu); “Computational Dynamics of a map with multiple stable states”, William Bench (adviser: Sarah Day); “Graph packing with constraints on edges”, Fangyi Xu  (adviser: Gexin Yu). Kopreski was selected as one of outstanding student presenters—only top 15% of more than 340 participating students were given with this honor.

Several mathematics faculty members also presented their work in the JMM. Professor Chi-Kwong Li gave a talk “Some optimization problems in quantum information science” in the MAA General Contributed Paper Session on Linear Algebra; Professor Junping Shi presented “Structure of attractors for the reaction-diffusion systems in chemical and biological models” in the AMS Special Session on Random and Complex Dynamics of Reaction-Diffusion System, and “Interaction of water and biomass: rich dynamics in a simple model” in the AMS Special Session on Recent Advances in Dynamical Systems and Mathematical Biology; Professor Sarah Day gave a lecture on “Dynamics and Chaos For Maps and The Conley Index” in the AMS Short Course on Rigorous Numerics in Dynamics; and Dr. Yu-Min Chung presented “Persistent Homology based thresholding method and applications” in the AMS Session on Computer Science, Information, Control Theory, and Economics.

The attendance of William and Mary students and faculty members was made possible by the funding of the William & Mary National Science Foundation EXTREEMS-QED Program and also William & Mary Charles Center. Expeditions in Training, Research, and Education for Mathematics and Statistics through Quantitative Explorations of Data (EXTREEMS-QED) program is an educational program supported by National Science Foundation to support efforts to educate the next generation of mathematics and statistics undergraduate students to confront new challenges in computational and data-enabled science and engineering (CDS&E). All students presenting in the JMM have participated in the EXTREEMS-QED research program in the summers of 2014 and 2015, under the guidance of faculty members from Mathematics, Applied Science, Physics, Biology and Marine Science.