Rubik 39;s 5x5 Professor
Martez Fields
For her project, Joy Albrecht of Thomas Edison Charter School in North Logan was mentored by Professor Aaron R. Brough, a marketing professor who specializes in survey research in the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University.
While the research shows a correlation and not necessarily a cause-and-effect relationship, the research does provide an important tool for educators and parents to help identify those students who may excel, or need additional help and resources, in learning math through the elementary and teenage years.
Sarah Andersen, a Utah State University Animal, Dairy, and Veterinary Sciences (ADVS) lecturer and recent graduate of USU's agricultural extension and education master's degree program, honored with the Outstanding Manuscript Award.
The Rubik's Cube started out as a game. Then a cult developed and a rash of books told how to solve the puzzle. Now a Yale University professor is teaching a course on how to solve the multicolored cube.
The cube has been used to illustrate group theory in Harvard courses, but it has not been used as the basis for an entire course, David B. Mumford, professor of Mathematics said yesterday. "It could possibly be the germ for a math tutorial, though," Mumford added.
Group theory involves transforming the positions of objects in space without changing their shapes, Howe said, adding that group theory gives structure and organization to the cube's 43 billion billion possible positions. The cube is solvable because this structure exists, Howe said.
Courses such as Howe's in the Yale seminar program are more flexible and experimental than courses in the regular curriculum. Howe said. If the cube seminar is successful, it could be turned into a regular course, he added.
Matthews, a Banneker/Key Scholar from Silver Spring, Maryland, is working to make safer lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries typically contain a liquid electrolyte, through which the lithium ions move. Matthews is developing new, non-flammable solid polymer electrolytes, which would be inherently safer than liquid electrolytes for applications like implanted biomedical devices.
Matthews has synthesized and characterized two solid polymer electrolytes. The first allows lithium metal to be safely used as the battery anode, which results in a battery with higher energy density. The second incorporates water as a component, which results in improved battery safety and no need for a dry manufacturing environment. Matthews demonstrated that batteries incorporating these electrolytes can function for hundreds of charge-discharge cycles without significant fade in energy output. Next, he plans to characterize and improve the interfaces between the electrolytes and electrodes to improve battery cell performance.
Matthews co-authored a paper accepted for publication in the journal Electrochimica Acta and was selected as the top student poster presenter in a fuels, petrochemicals and energy category at the 2019 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Annual Meeting. He also received the Dinah Berman Memorial Award, which honors one junior engineering major at UMD who shows outstanding scholastic, leadership and service endeavors.
In the field of mathematics, Matthews worked for two summers with Radu Balan, a professor of mathematics and the Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling, to improve noise reduction in signal processing for speech recognition and X-ray crystallography.
Moroch is working with Koeth to develop a novel cyclotron storage ring for Lockheed Martin. The company is interested in using the technology for a new class of power supplies for aerospace electric propulsion systems that can carry things into the solar system and beyond.
The AMINO algorithm code is open source and is already being used by other research groups and pharmaceutical companies to help improve their modeling and workflow of drug design. AMINO helps scientists overcome the barrier of needing a priori information about the system they are looking at.
The College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland educates more than 8,000 future scientific leaders in its undergraduate and graduate programs each year. The college's 10 departments and nine interdisciplinary research centers foster scientific discovery with annual sponsored research funding exceeding $250 million.
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