Two IIT Applied Math Undergraduates Take Top Research Prizes at ISMAA Annual Meeting
IIT undergraduate students YoungJu Jo and Christos Mitillos, who do research with Applied Mathematics Assistant Professor Hemanshu Kaul, won first and second prize for Outstanding Undergraduate Research at the annual meeting of the Illinois Section of the Mathematical Association of America (ISMAA).The prizes were based on the students' research papers and presentations during the ISMAA meeting, held April 3-4 at Bradley University in Peoria. This is the first year that ISMAA has awarded the OUR prizes.
YoungJu Jo's research involves what are known as art gallery problems in discrete and computational geometry, which she started working on in Summer 2008. The art gallery problem asks for the minimum number of guards sufficient to see the interior of an "art gallery" (modeled as a polygon). This question arises in many applications where "art gallery" could be the floor plan of a building and "guards" could be security cameras, wireless access points, and so forth. You can read more about her research here.
She presented her work earlier this year at the 11th Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women on January 31 and will present it next at the Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium on April 18.
Chris Mitillos has been working in a topic of graph theory called "fall-coloring of graphs," also since Summer 2008, when he was awarded a CSL Undergraduate Summer Research Stipend to start this work. Graphs are mathematical structures underlying networks, or more generally they model pairwise relations in a collection of objects. They have numerous applications in social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, and more. Fall-coloring asks for partitioning a graph into "conflict-free" parts such that each such part is "close" to every object in the graph. Read more here. Chris will present his work next at the Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium on April 18.
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