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Natural Science Seminar Showcases Award-winning Research of Seaver Students
The Seaver College Natural Science Division continues its lunchtime seminar series with a presentation by four Seaver College mathematics students who conducted a year-long research project in 2008. Junior Kristen Anderson, and seniors Ashley Burt, Will Cousins and Brent Hancock, will present their award-winning research "A Sinkhorn-Knopp Fixed Point Problem" at 12 noon on Wednesday, Mar. 11, in room 130 of the Keck Science Center on the Malibu campus.
Under the mentorship of David Strong, associate professor of mathematics at Pepperdine, these four students researched various aspects of a fixed-point problem that derives from the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm, first introduced in the 1960s, for transforming (through pre- and post-multiplication) any positive matrix into a doubly stochastic matrix. There are a variety of applications that use doubly stochastic matrices, including algorithms used by Google to search for and rank Web pages.
In January, the students traveled to Washington D.C. to share their research at the annual joint meetings of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and Mathematical Association of America (MAA). Nearly 300 undergraduate research students from across the country displayed posters and discussed their findings with the several hundred faculty and students in attendance at the session. Cousins' poster received an award of distinction, which is given to the top 10 percent of poster presenters. The award included a $100 cash prize.
Each student received a stipend and academic credit for the work he or she did while studying at Pepperdine during spring and fall semesters in 2008. Their work was funded by the National Science Foundation through the Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics, located at Brigham Young University.
Upon graduation this year, seniors Cousins and Hancock will attend graduate school in mathematics and Burt will attend medical school, while junior Anderson plans to attend hospitality and management school upon graduation in 2010.
"This is a great opportunity for a few of our more advanced mathematics students to share with their peers and the rest of the Pepperdine community some of the new mathematics they have been developing," Strong says.
Strong says he hopes to see more students in the Natural Science Seminar lineup. "I, along with the other mathematics professors, look forward to continuing collaborations with our students to further develop current mathematical ideas and results, as well as discover new ones, that are both interesting and potentially useful to better understanding and solving real life problems."
The seminar is free and open to the public. For more information and a full series schedule, visit the Natural Science Seminar Series Web site.
