Welcome to the 2024 Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Mathematics Conference. This is our 39th conference, and we look forward to hosting you on the beautiful Rose-Hulman campus.
The vision for the Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Mathematics Conference is to provide a venue to highlight and celebrate the accomplishments and work of undergraduate mathematicians and statisticians. The conference is put on largely by undergraduates for undergraduates. The contributed student talks will cover an array of topics including pure mathematical theory, applied modeling, statistics, and data science.
The 2024 program is now available.
Invited Speakers
Robert Bosch
Single-Line Drawings via Mathematical Optimization
Optimization is concerned with optimal performance--finding the best way to complete a task. It has been put to good use in a great number of diverse disciplines: advertising, agriculture, biology, business, economics, engineering, manufacturing, medicine, telecommunications, and transportation (to name but a few). In this lecture, we will showcase its amazing utility by demonstrating its applicability in the area of visual art, which at first glance might seem to have no use for it whatsoever! Our focus will be on how various techniques in mathematical optimization can be used to design beautiful and intricate single-line drawings.
Dr. Robert Bosch is the James F. Clark Professor of Mathematics at Oberlin College and is an award-winning writer and artist. He specializes in optimization, the branch of mathematics concerned with optimal performance. His sculpture "Embrace" was awarded first prize at the 2010 Mathematical Art Exhibition in San Francisco. His book "Opt Art: From Mathematical Optimization to Visual Design" was published by Princeton University Press in 2019.
Lucy Muthoni
Bringing ‘x’ to Life: The other Side of Mathematics
Mathematicians have often been accused of tasking students to find ‘x’. This presentation aims to make it clear that we do not send students on a senseless task to look for our exes,
but to bring sense to the data being presented to them for the sake of decision making.
The objective of this talk is threefold: first, to demystify the meaning and importance of random variables by explaining the basic meaning of input and output variables,
then explain how they relate to each other through functions and how that translates to different applications, and to finally merge the two concepts into probability functions and showcase
how these distributions contribute to decisions that affect our everyday lives.
Dr. Lucy Muthoni has taught and used Mathematics to solve a myriad of multi-sectoral problems for more than 15 years in different countries
(South Africa, Ghana, Botswana and Namibia), including the United States of America where she is currently working as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at the
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology at the Department of Mathematics.
She has been working with the Kenyan Commission for Revenue Allocation (CRA) as an academic technocrat since 2016, contributing on the construction of indices used in the revenue sharing formula
used by the Kenyan National Government to share revenue among the 47 County Governments. She was also part of the team tasked with feasibility study of National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) rates
which were implemented in 2015 to facilitate Universal healthcare in Kenya. In addition to that, she is in the Advisory Board of East Africa Forum for Structured Products
(renamed as East African Forum for Alternative Investment) which is tasked with facilitating the success of alternative investment channels in East African securities and commodities markets.