This November, Ph.D. candidates in Mathematics Samantha Pezzimenti and Danielle Smiley represented the Department of Mathematics with talks at the Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware Section of the Mathematical Association of America Conference. First year graduate student Daniel White also attended the event. Alum Eva Goedhart (Ph.D. ’15), Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Lebenaon Valley College, also presented. The meeting was held at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.
In her talk “Random Legendrian Knots: Preliminary Results,” Samantha Pezzimenti explored the properties of knots – a mathematical concept akin to a tangled closed loop. Samantha presented her recent joint work with Professor of Mathematics, Lisa Traynor, and Samantha Kacir (B.A. ’17) using the computer programming language C++ to model a specific type of knot, known as the Legendrian knot, which has an extra property coming from contact geometry.
Danielle Smiley shared her current research into the field of harmonic analysis, with its roots in the 19th century. In her talk “A Historical Survey on Estimating Oscillatory Singular Integral Operators,” Danielle presented the origins of the operator while highlighting advances developed over the past century in various techniques for determining general and specific bounds of such operators over differing function spaces.