Research

Examples of recent student-faculty research in the department:

• Emmanuel Asante-Asamani, Charlotte Orr, and Terrance Pendleton, A Comparative Assessment of Exponential Time Differencing Schemes and Numerical Differentiation Formulas for Simulating Calcium Release in Heart Muscle Cells (ongoing).
• Jerry Honts, Terrance Pendleton, and Johanna Smith, Mathematical Modeling of a novel calcium-binding protein TCB2 (ongoing).
• Carter McCall and Christopher Porter, Kolmogorov complexity and error-correcting codes, a project funded by a $7,000 scholarship for McCall from the Iowa Space Consortium, Fall 2017-Spring 2018.
• David Mascharka, Charlie Nelson, and Christopher Porter, Classification and compression of cosmological data utilizing Kolmogorov complexity, a project funded by a $5,000 scholarship for Mascharka from the Iowa Space Consortium, Fall 2016-Spring 2017.
• William Leeson and Adam Resnick are working with Daniel Alexander and Prof. John Rovers (CPHS) on a project titled “Using Natural Language Processing to Analyze Public Heath Interviews.” They use natural language processing tools to analyze over 50 interview Rovers conducted in the district of Toledo in Belize. These interviews were conducted with males living in Toledo, Belize, and were designed to solicit their perceptions on health issues in Toledo. The hope is to develop a tool that not only helps analyze these interviews, but can be used in other contacts.
• Stephanie Running and Maryann Huey, A Characterization of Textbooks: Algebra and Function in an Era of Common Core State Standards, DUSCI, Iowa Council of Teachers of Mathematics publication
• Elizabeth Fiedler and Maryann Huey, Statistics and Probability for Teaching Secondary Students, Mathematics and Science Partnership grant

Selected Faculty Research & Publications:

• Deborah Kent and David Muraki, "A Geometric Solution of a Cubic by Omar Khayyam ... in Which Colored Diagrams are Used Instead of Letters for the Greater Ease of Learners," The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 123, No. 2 (February 2016), pp. 149-160.  Winner of the MAA's 2017 Paul R. Halmos-Lester R. Ford Award for expository writing.
• A. Chertock, J.-G. Liu, and Terrance Pendleton. "Elastic Collisions Among Peakon Solutions for the Camassa-Holm Equation." Applied Numerical Mathematics, 2016.
• H. Liu, and T. Pendleton. "On Invariant-Preserving Finite Difference Schemes for the Camassa-Holm Equation and the Two Component Camassa-Holm Equation." Communications in Computational Physics, 2016.
• Deborah Kent and Matt DeVos, Game Theory: A Playful Introduction, Student Mathematical Library, Vol. 80, American Mathematical Society, 2016.
• Rupert Hölzl and Christopher Porter, Randomness for computable measures and initial segment complexity, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, 2017.
• Laurent Bienvenu and Christopher Porter, Deep Pi^0_1 Classes, The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 2016.
• Christopher Porter, On analogues of the Church-Turing thesis in algorithmic randomness, The Review of Symbolic Logic, 2016.
• Daniel Alexander and Robert L. Devaney, "A Century of Complex Dynamics," Centennial edition of the Mathematics Association of America Monthly
• Daniel Alexander, Felice Iavernaro and Alessandro Rosa, Early Days in Complex Dynamics, History of Mathematics Series, AMS-LMS, 2011
• Daniel Alexander, A History of Complex Dynamics from Schroder to Fatou and Julia, Vieweg Publishing, 1994
• Dan Alexander, along with Prof. John Rovers (CPHS) and Prof. Thomas Westbrook (A&S) obtained a grant entitled “Drake University’s Presence in the Toledo District of Southern Belize: Maximizing Our Impact While Minimizing Our Footprint,” through the Nelson Institute at Drake, http://www.drake.edu/nelsoninstitute/.
• Maryann Huey was awarded two large grants in the past four years titled  “Statistics and Probability, Content and Pedagogy, for Secondary Teachers” Iowa Mathematics and Science Partnership Grant for $600,000, and “Statistics for Teaching Secondary Students” Iowa Mathematics and Science Partnership Grant for $125,000.  Through these grants, students have been able to work on research related to training over 100 secondary mathematics teachers throughout the state of Iowa on improving instruction related to probability and statistics.  A total of eight mathematics education and mathematics student researchers have been funded through this grant work resulting in co-publications with three students and one student publishing on her own.