BIG (Business, Industry, and Government) Problems News
Jeffrey Wheeler, PhD
This spring's BIG Problems students continued the tradition of the class’s excellence and added to the list of the course's accomplishments. Participants were given the opportunity to work on projects for a Major League Baseball organization and a local artisan coffee roaster. Both teams exceeded client expectations with their work, gave quality presentations of their solutions, and presented their clients with usable deliverables.
Additionally, the two teams, as well as Pitt graduate student Edison Hauptman, gave talks featuring their work at the spring meeting of the Allegheny Mountains Section of the Mathematical Association of America. All three talks were very well attended, with the coffee presentation standing room only.
Edison's talk "Explaining the Math of Queer Relationship Dynamics", where Edison creatively presents stable matchings in Graph Theory, was so well received that he has been invited to give the talk at Westminster College the next academic year.
The team that worked for Pittsburgh artisan roaster Nineteen Coffee Company was tasked with some pricing analysis. Various roasts lead to different levels of moisture evaporation and the resulting coffee beans have different weights depending on how they have been roasted.
Using data acquired from Nineteen Coffee, the team created a usable Excel worksheet that would offer the various prices for each of the roasts to obtain a desired margin in sales. The team even created a user manual for the spreadsheet. David DiOrio, proprietor of Nineteen Coffee, said of the student's work:
“When Dr. Wheeler approached us last fall about a potential project for his BIG Problems class, we were excited about the possibility of having some good analysis done on pricing our product. The Pitt students exceeded our expectations in not only doing high-quality work on that analysis but also providing us with an easy-to-use Excel spreadsheet to assist us with our decision-making. We very much look forward to using their work and are already eager about a possible cost forecasting project next year.”
The team doing the project for the Pirates was tasked with analyzing over 1.7 million pitches to create an effective pitcher versus batting pitch sequence strategy. Each of the 1.7 million pitches had 27 components: type of pitch, pitcher, batter, field location, time of day, etc. and the students sorted the data to address the question.
Despite such a large amount of data, often for a certain type of pitch from a given pitcher to a set batter, the sample size was determined to be too low. The team creatively produced a mechanism by which they could include the same pitch from a similar pitcher into the sample space. Their means of evaluating the similarity of pitchers was well received by professional baseball analysts. The team gave their talk in the board room at PNC Park and before leaving, offered the Pirates their data on over 30 pitcher's strategies against a large number of batters.
2022 Painter Fellows
Jason Deblois, PhD
Thanks to the generosity of the Painter family, who endowed the Painter Fellowship fund, and to the generosity of our community at large, the Math Department supports faculty-mentored research by undergraduate students over the summer. During Summer 2022, we supported six Painter and Departmental Undergraduate Research Fellows. They studied topics across the spectrum of the pure and applied math research areas represented in the department, producing interesting results and acquiring valuable experience. Their projects are summarized below.
Mentored by Dr. Armin Schikorra, Matthew Alford did work in analysis. He explored the application of convex integration to approximating Lipschitz functions by others with constrained derivative, working through a paper of Muller-Sverak. A highlight of their project was finding an error in the proof of a key result there, then working out a corrected argument.
Anant Bajwa was mentored by Dr. Bard Ermentrout, a mathematical biologist. She used XPPAUT, a software tool that numerically solves systems of ordinary differential equations, to model “slow waves”: spontaneous electrical events that cause smooth muscle contractions in the gastrointestinal tract.
Under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Gilton, Adam Hicks first worked through notes on set theory written by Anush Tserunyan. He learned to use transfinite induction, work with infinite cardinal numbers, and identify the Axiom of Choice. Adam and Dr. Gilton then read into the research paper “Infinite Combinatorics Revisited in the Absence of Axiom of Choice,” with an eye toward attacking the problems at the end of the paper.
Anastasiia Rudenko worked in number theory, mentored by Dr. Carl Wang-Erickson. After learning the basics, she created an extensive collection of Python programs while studying the mathematics of cryptography.
Nicholas Sidelinker studied a macroeconomics-motivated optimal control problem, in which values of a control are chosen to maximize the payoff of a quantity that evolves according to a dynamical system. With direction from Dr. Michael Neilan, Nicholas used finite-difference methods to numerically approximate the solution to a case of the ``Ramsey problem”, which was first posed in 1928, then analyzed the resulting approximate solution’s error.
With Dr. Kiumars Kaveh, Samuel Tomack worked on a problem at the intersection of algebra and geometry. He explored extending a result of Khovanskii on integer lattice points in R^n to the setting of the “Heisenberg group”, R^3 equipped with a non-abelian but nilpotent product. Khovanskii’s result precisely describes the growth rate of the m-fold product of a finite set of integer lattice points in R^n as m grows. Samuel proved the analogous result for two-element sets in the Heisenberg group.
Fellowship recipients expressed gratitude for the opportunity to have the experience of focusing on mathematics research. We in turn are grateful to our donors for allowing us to provide this opportunity.
Association for Women in Mathematics: University of Pittsburgh Student Chapter
Farjana Siddiqua, President
About The Organization
The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a professional, non-profit organization founded in the year 1971, with the purpose of encouraging women to study and have active careers in the mathematical sciences, promoting equal opportunity, and promoting and supporting women in mathematics. The AWM currently has more than 3500 members representing a broad spectrum of the mathematical community, in the United States and many other countries around the world.
The University of Pittsburgh AWM Student Chapter is glad to be part of this great organization. The Chapter is organized and operated for the educational and scientific purposes of promoting an increased knowledge of and greater interest in the mathematical sciences, including pure and applied mathematics, statistics, and their applications. It also strives to promote a greater understanding of the contribution of women in mathematics and to mentor and encourage women mathematicians as they consider or prepare for careers in the mathematical sciences. The membership of the Chapter is open to all students.
The Chapter comprises four officers and a faculty sponsor. The officers are: Farjana Siddiqua as President, Sushmita John as Vice-President, Rui Fang as Secretary, and Anna Kishida Thomas as Treasurer. All the officers are currently pursuing PhDs in different areas of Mathematics. The faculty advisor of the Chapter is Professor Marta Lewicka. For more information, please visit the Pitt AWM website.
AWM Programming
One of our chief programs is Undergraduate Female Mentoring, which pairs a few graduate students with interested undergraduate students who seek advice regarding different opportunities in Mathematics and want to discuss their research interests. This mentoring program helps younger students decide which branches of Mathematics they want to explore for further academic interest.
Starting in January 2021, the Chapter has hosted the monthly Pitt AWM Student Seminar Series, held on the first Fridays at 4:45 p.m. Every meeting features two 30-minute long talks by female PhD students, each presenting the speaker's research outcomes. This seminar is hoped to give a platform to female students-researchers, to promote the spirit of collegiality and collaboration, and to recognize the hard work of students. Video-recorded talks are available on YouTube.
To date, 38 PhD students from different parts of the world gave talks on their ongoing research and more talks are scheduled for the future. This seminar is well appreciated by the faculty members and students alike, as well as previous speakers who keep attending the seminar. We hope to continue this amazing series.
The Chapter also conducts occasional Virtual Coffee Meetings with female math peers who share their professional experience and journey to become successful mathematicians. Our guests included:
- Silvia Jimenez Bolanos, Associate Professor at Colgate University, who spoke about her own career trajectory as well as answered questions about strategies for applying for jobs in liberal arts colleges;
- Donatella Danielli, Professor at Arizona State University, who shared her experience of the mathematical journey and answered questions about career and many more topics;
- Jennifer A. Loe, Postdoctoral Researcher at Sandia National Laboratories, who gave a technical talk in the field of numerical analysis, followed by a story of the career choices which brought her to working a premier national lab.
We have also arranged in personal coffee meeting with Assistant Professor Dr. Sabrina Streipert and Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Rebecca Durst of the University of Pittsburgh. They discussed and encouraged the students by sharing their stories and academic journeys. The chapter also arranges social events like game night, and dinner outside to motivate students to have work-life balance.
Overall, Pitt AWM has been actively conducting various programs and keeping its members connected by creating opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to gather and support one another, and to discuss issues pertaining to women in mathematics. We hope to continue our service to the best of our abilities and to perform up to the mark of the AWM mission.