Three Applied Mathematics Students Win $5,000 Undergraduate Summer Research Stipends

Matt Bauer, associate dean for academic affairs, College of Science and Letters (CSL), announced the winners of this year's CSL Undergraduate Summer Research Stipends. Each student will receive $5,000 to do research with a faculty member this summer. Of the nine winners, three are applied mathematics students (listed below).

Haocheng Bian (AMAT and CS 2nd year) will join forces with Greg Fasshauer, professor of applied mathematics, for the project "Kernel Methods in Computational Mathematics." Kernels are used to build different kinds of mathematical models. Bian will use appropriate techniques to find models that have good approximation properties, investigating existing kernel methods and creating new ones.

Melanie Dooley (AMAT and PHYS 2nd year) will team up with Duchossois Professor of Physics Carlo Segre for "Fabricating a Rapid Annealing Furnace." Dooley will fabricate a microwave furnace, make her own samples of ferroelectric ceramics, and participate in experiments at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, helping research teammates to obtain extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) data on their samples.

Martha Razo (AMAT 1st year) will work with Fred Hickernell, applied mathematics chair and professor, on "Improvements to Quadrature Algorithms." Automatic integration (quadrature) algorithms take as inputs a function routine, an interval of integration, and a tolerance. They claim to provide the requested integral with an error no greater than the tolerance. Unfortunately, nearly all such algorithms can be fooled. Razo and Hickernell will try to determine the characteristics of integrands that fool automatic quadrature algorithms and then suggest how to improve those algorithms.