Donor Giving Supports Math in Impactful Ways

Apr 21, 2024

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Each year, generous donors support programs, people and initiatives in the Mathematics Department.  Here are two recent highlights of use of this invaluable funding.

Please consider supporting future work at the link below.

Student Awards

Each spring, we recognize exceptional undergraduate and graduate students in categories such as Outstanding Thesis, Outstanding Senior in Mathematics, and Outstanding Mathematics Educator. Selected students each receive a $500 award. At this event, we also announce scholarship recipients that are supported by individual donor scholarship funds—last year the department awarded $140,000 in donor-funded scholarships to 70 students. 

Speaker series and community-building events: 

Throughout the academic year, students and faculty are brought together to hear colloquium speakers and for other community-building events. Colloquia are held weekly throughout the academic year on topics such as “Iteration of rational maps in two complex variables” and “Triangulations in low dimensional geometry and topology.” In addition, regular student socials provide math majors and minors, transfer students, and graduate students opportunities to connect and discover available resources. An annual welcome barbeque kicks off the beginning of the school year, and the year ends with an annual awards banquet to recognize student achievements.

Support Mathematics Department here: https://securelb.imodules.com/s/699/bp19/interior.aspx?sid=699&gid=1&sitebuilder=1&pgid=961&cid=2272&bledit=1&dids=131&appealcode=A3711&sort=1

 

*Photo by Alexis Kovacevic of Mathematics Professor Elena Dimitrova (left) and graduate student Giovani Thai (right)

 

Association for Women in Mathematics Aim High

Apr 21, 2024

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Cal Poly’s Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) thrives with ambitious and sophisticated members. The association said that its “members aim high, whether it’s to pursue working in the industry or academia.”

“Our goal is to cultivate an inclusive community to uplift women and nonbinary individuals in their mathematical endeavors,” they wrote. “Our mission is to support our members’ professional development at Cal Poly by hosting both social and guest speaker events, connecting members with the overall math community and successful AWM alumni. For instance, guests like Paige Hillen and Leah Hoogstra shared their experiences in their current Ph.D. programs, offering advice to members considering that route.”

Social events such as poker and trivia nights foster member connections, ensuring Cal Poly's women in math feel part of the broader mathematical community.

 

Math Academy Introduces High School Students to STEM Majors

Apr 21, 2024

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Amelie Schinck-Mikel and Elsa Medina directed the twelfth annual Cal Poly Math Academy in the summer 2023, welcoming a little over 35 high school students served by the local Migrant Education Program to campus. The academy is a one-week mathematics enrichment program in which students have fun with hands-on mathematical activities and puzzle-like problems. During the week, academy participants also do interesting activities across campus to expose them to various STEM majors and university life. After much demand, the Cal Poly Math Academy will be expanded to two weeks in the summer 2024: The first week will welcome high school students and the second week, middle school student.

Publications

*denotes a Cal Poly Student

 

Chance, B., Medina, E., Silverbush, J. (2023). If you only have one hour…Teaching statistical inference to youth. Statistics Teacher, March 23, 2023.

Charalampidis, E.G., Parker, R., Kevrekidis, P.G., Lafortune, S. (2023). The stability of the $b$-family of peakon equations. Nonlinearity, 36, 1192.

Cooper, F., Khare, A., Dawson, J., Charalampidis, E.G., Saxena, A. (2023). Uniform-density Bose-Einstein condensates of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation found by solving the inverse problem for the confining potential.
Phys. Rev. E, 107, 064202

Dimitrova, E.S., Fredrickson, C.H.*, Rondoni, N.A.*, Stigler, B., Veliz-Cuba, A. (2024). Algebraic experimental design: theory and computation. SIAM J Applied Algebra and Geometry. 8:2, 1-25.

Dimitrova, E.S., Knapp, A.C., Stigler, B., Stillman, M.E. (2023). Cyclone: open-source package for simulation and analysis of finite dynamical systems, Bioinformatics, 39:11, btad634.

Lee, M., Charalampidis, E.G., Xing, S., Chong, C., Kevrekidis, P.G. (2023). Breathers in lattices with alternating strain-hardening and strain-softening interactions. Phys. Rev. E, 107, 054208.

Liou, C., Mendes, A. (2023). Matrix represenations from labeled trees. Journal of Integer Sequences. 26.

Orson, P., Powell, M. (2024). Simple spines of homotopy 2‐spheres are unique. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 128. 10.1112/plms.12583.

Saqlain, S., Zhu, W., Charalampidis, E.G., Kevrekidis, P.G. (2023). Discovering governing equations in discrete systems using PINNs. Commun. Nonlinear Sci. Numer. Simulat, 126, 107498

Schinck-Mikel, A., Paulding, K., & Medina, E. (2023). Capturing unique teaching experiences of first-year secondary mathematics teachers transitioning from virtual to in-person instruction. Conference proceedings of the Education and New Developments Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. 96-100.

Veliz-Cuba, A., Newsome-Slade, V.*, Dimitrova, E.S. (2024). A unified approach to reverse engineering and data selection for unique network identification. SIAM J Applied Dynamical Systems, 23:1, 592-615.

 

Conferences

Stathis Charalampidis gave talks at:

• Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, February 7, 2023. “Rogue Waves in Continuous and Discrete Models”
• SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems, Portland, OR, May 14 - 18, 2023. “Self-similar collapse to the NLS: A bifurcation analysis approach”
• The 13th AIMS Conference on Dynamical Systems and Differential Equations, University of North Carolina Wilmington, May 31 - June 4 2023. “Extreme nonlinear excitations in lattice and continuum models”
• Department of Mathematics, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, June 9, 2023. “The computation of matter waves in Bose-Einstein Condensates: Existence, stability, and bifurcations”
• “Bridging Classical and Quantum Turbulence”, Institut d’´Etudes Scientifiques, Cargese, Corsica, France, July 4 - July 14, 2023. “The Computation of Vortical Patterns in Bose-Einstein Condensates with Deflation: Existence, stability, and dynamics.
• Department of Mathematics, Kennesaw State University, Marietta, GA, October 13, 2023. “Recent advances in atomic Bose-Einstein Condensates: From Theory to Computation”

Elena Dimitrova gave talks at:

• Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM), An Algebraic Approach to Reverse Engineering and Data Selection for Network Identification, January 2024.
• Society for Mathematical Biology (SMB) Annual Meeting, A Unified Approach to Reverse Engineering and Data Selection for Unique Network Identification, The Ohio State University, July 2023.
• American Mathematical Society (AMS) Spring Western Sectional Meeting, Algebraic Design of Experiments for Regulatory Network Identification, Fresno State University, May 2023.
• Association of Women in Mathematics Seminar, UC Santa Barbara, Unique Reduced Gröbner Bases of Ideals of Points, March 2023.

Sean Gasiorek co-organized a JMM Special Session on Navigating the Early Years of the Faculty Experience (MAA Project NeXT Special Sessions), Boston, MA (January 2023)

Sean Gasiorek gave talks at:

• The Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, “Dynamics and Periodicity Conditions for the Integrable Boltzmann System” (October 2023)
• 11^th Workshop on Integrable Systems, “Dynamics and Periodicity Conditions for the Integrable Boltzmann System”, held at the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia (November/December 2023)
• 67^th Annual Conference of the Australian Mathematical Society, “Dynamics and Periodicity Conditions for the Integrable Boltzmann System”, held at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia (December 2023)

Todd Grundmeier and Danielle Champney

• gave a talk at the SIGMAA IBL Spring 2024 Speaker Series on "Leveraging existing tasks into low-floor high-ceiling experiences.” Dec 2023.
• ran an MAA Learning Community in Fall 2023 titled "Rich Mathematical Tasks for Mathematics for Future Elementary Teacher Courses."

Joyce Lin organized a Special Session on Modeling and Analysis of Cellular Processes in Biomedical Problems at American Mathematical Society Western Sectional meeting, Fresno, CA, May 2023.

Joyce Lin gave talks at:

• The Society of Mathematical Biology, Columbus, OH, Jul. 2023
• Association for Women in Mathematics Student Chapter, Santa Barbara, CA, May 2023

Elsa Medina gave talks at:

• The International Conference on Education and New Developments, Lisbon, Portugal. “Capturing unique teaching experiences of first-year secondary mathematics teachers transitioning from virtual to in-person instruction,” (2023).

• Promoviendo el Pensamiento Estadístico: Implicaciones y desafíos para la enseñanza. Santiago, Chile. (2023)

Patrick Orson gave talks at:

• Algebraic methods in manifold topology, University of Glasgow, UK, June 2023.
• Topology Seminar, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, Bonn, Germany, August 2023.
• Topology Seminar, Boston College, October 2023.

Letter from the Chair 2024

Apr 21, 2024

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Alumni and friends of the Mathematics Department,

If you have a chance to swing by the department for a visit one of these afternoons, you’ll see a number of new faces. The loss of two mathematics education faculty (one to another position and one retirement) and the increasing demand for math classes as the university grows (and contemplates year-round operations) has led to a flurry of recruitments that shows no signs of abating. Allow me to make a few introductions here.

First, we were joined this past fall by Dr. Ciera Street. Dr. Street earned her Ph.D. in educational mathematics at the Colorado State University last spring under Dr. Jessica Ellis Hagman (herself a Cal Poly Master’s degree mathematics graduate in 2011). Dr. Street’s area of expertise is utilizing an intersection lens and critical theories to explore the ways marginalized students experience undergraduate mathematics at the intersection of social, historical, and political influences to promote more equitable mathematics education. Special thanks to Dr. Danielle Champney for successfully chairing the screening committee whose recommendation led to Dr. Street’s hire. The entire Cal Poly Mathematics Department and the Math Ed group, in particular, are so pleased that Dr. Street agreed to come and help us educate future math educators.

We also welcomed three new full-time lecturers to our ranks. The first, Dr. Michael Miller, earned his Ph.D. in 2011 at UC Santa Cruz studying representation theory of finite groups under Dr. Robert Boltjé. Dr. Miller worked as an adjunct instructor at Cabrillo College from 2008 to 2018 and as a math instructor at Prepa UPAEP Santiago, a private International Baccalaureate World School high school in Puebla Mexico from 2019 to 2021. In fall of 2021 he began teaching part-time for the Cal Poly Mathematics Department and we were happy that he agreed to a full-time position beginning this fall.

Second is Dr. Brian Tyrrell-Nic Dhonncha. Dr. Tyrrell-Nic Dhonncha earned his earned his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, Balliol College in 2022 under Dr. Jochen Koenigsmann, studying mathematical logic, number theory, and algebraic geometry. From 2022 to 2023 he served (simultaneously) as an EPSRC postdoctoral research associate at the Mathematical Institute, Oxford, as well as a stipendary lecturer in mathematics at Keble College, both part of the University of Oxford. Dr. Nic Dhonncha also began teaching for us in fall 2023.

The third new full-time lecturer is Dr. Robert Lopez. Dr. Lopez earned his Ph.D. from UC Riverside in 2021 under Dr. Amir Moradifam with a research area broadly focused on inverse problems, imaging, and partial differential equations. From fall 2021 to spring 2023 he held the position of full-time instructor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Whittier College, but we enticed him to join us at Cal Poly, also in fall 2023.

These are just the new faculty that have already arrived on campus. This past fall/winter we also searched for three addition positions, appointments to begin in fall 2024. Dr. Danielle Champney chaired the screening committee for a second math educator, and Ms. Saba Germani has accepted our offer. Germani holds a master’s degree from Cal Poly and will graduate with her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan this spring. Dr. Dylan Retsek chaired the screening committee to search for two new faculty members in pure mathematics (one position open due to a retirement and the other a new tenure line authorized by the provost). In fall 2024 we will be joined by Dr. Austin Christian, a 2021 UCLA graduate currently a postdoc at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Dr. Jackson Goodman, a 2020 University of Pennsylvania grad, who’s currently a visiting assistant professor at Colby College. Watch this space next year for complete introductions when these three arrive on campus.

We will also welcome two new Frost postdocs this. Last year Dr. Joyce Lin and Dr. Elena Dimitrova wrote a successful proposal and were awarded funding to support a postdoc position to study mathematical biology. In fall 2024, Dr. Alex Ruys de Perez, a 2021 Texas A&M grad currently serving as visiting assistant professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, will arrive on campus to join the research group as well as teaching for the department. Dr. Patrick Orson was similarly awarded funding to support a position in topology, and Ms. Terrin Warren, who will earn her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Georgia this spring, will join his research team at the beginning of next academic year.

Finally, we expect to run an additional recruitment next year for a fall 2025 start. The applied math group will have their turn next fall/winter and search for an applied mathematician to fill an additional new tenure line authorized by the Provost’s Office.

So it’s been a busy, but very rewarding year (so far!). In the midst of all this hiring, the department has been maintaining the mathematical life and educational mission of the department, offering rich coursework, abundant student research opportunities, maintaining our own research programs, and supervising (and funding) a significant amount of student travel to mathematical research conferences. This latter activity, one of the many made possible by your generous support, constitutes an incredibly powerful and formative experience for budding mathematicians and we are immensely grateful for your generosity. Indeed, without you we couldn’t do many of the things — like maintaining the undergraduate study lounge, running Simple Group, bringing speakers to campus, and a myriad of other activities that make a math major at Cal Poly so rich. Thanks so much for your support!

Please keep in touch and let us know what you’ve been up to. We'd love to see you at the department office if you're ever on campus.

Sincerely,

Ben Richert, Chair, Mathematics Department

Polymath 2024

Apr 21, 2024

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Professors in Action: Math Faculty Present Talks Around the Nation, World

Feb 19, 2023

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Photo 1: High school students participated in the 10th annual Cal Poly Math Academy.

By Nick Wilson

 

Several Mathematics Department faculty members issued talks across the United States and beyond over the past year. The faculty who presented are the following: 

Stathis Charalampidis

• The 12th IMACS International Conference on Nonlinear Evolution Equations and Wave Phenomena: Computation and Theory, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, March 30 - April 1, 2022. “Recent advances in single and multi-component NLS systems”
• Conference on “Nonlinear waves and networks,” Institut National des Sciences Appliquées
•  (INSA) de Rouen Normandie, France, July 4 - July 5, 2022. “Recent Advances on Localized Solutions in NLS systems: Theory and Computation”
• SIAM Conference on Nonlinear Waves and Coherent Structures, Bremen, Germany, August 30 - September 2, 2022. “Novel coherent structures to single- and multi-component NLS systems: Theory and Computation”
• AMS Fall Eastern Sectional Meeting, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, October 1 - 2, 2022. “Recent advances on Rogue waves in continuous and discrete models”
• Colloquium, Mathematics Department, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA, November 19, 2022. “Recent advances on extreme events to discrete and continuum models''

 

Elena Dimitrova

• Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS), Workshop on Multiscale Modeling of Plant Growth, Pattern Formation and Actuation (hybrid conference), “PlantSimLab - a modeling and simulation web tool for plant biologists,” Oaxaca, Mexico. 
• 12th European Conference on Mathematical and Theoretical Biology (a joint event of the European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology (ESMTB) and the Society for Mathematical Biology (SMB)), “Revealing the canalizing structure of Boolean functions – algorithms and applications,” University of Heidelberg, Germany.

 

Todor Todorov

• International Conference on Generalized Functions GF2022, Vienna, Austria, September 19-23, 2022: "Non-Standard Version of Egorov’s Algebra of Generalized Functions”
• A colloquium-seminar on theoretical physics in the Institute for Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy, Sofia, Bulgaria, November 24, 2022: “Infinitesimals in the Field of Complex Numbers”

 

Goro Kato 

Joyce Lin

California State University Joint Math Meeting, November 2022, Northridge, California. “Conduction Reserve Theory in Cardiac Tissue With Reduced Gap Junctional Coupling.”

Elsa Medina

The 11th International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS 11), September 2022, Rosario, Argentina. “Stochastics Content Knowledge of Pre-service Chilean Mathematics Teachers”

Amelie Schinck-Mikel

The Annual Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators Meeting, Henderson, Nevada. Feb. 2022. “Lessons from the pandemic; Leveraging unique teaching experiences to inform mathematics secondary clinical practice”

Photo 2: The 10th annual Cal Poly Math Academy, directed by Elsa Medina and Amélie Schinck-Mikel, welcomed more than 25 Hispanic students from local high schools to campus this summer.

Publications and Grants: Cal Poly Math Makes Its Mark

Feb 19, 2023

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Photo caption: Dr. Joyce Lin (right) was among the faculty who received grant awards. Lin is pictured here with student Sarah Ellwein at the Cal Poly Math Symposium.

Publications:

Brussel E. (2022) Hasse invariant for the tame Brauer group of a higher local field. Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, Series B, 9, 258–287.

 

Dimitrova E.S., Stigler B., Kadelka C., Murrugarra D. (2022) Revealing the canalizing structure of Boolean functions: Algorithms and applications. Automatica, 146, 110630.

 

Dimitrova, E.S., Hu, J., Liang, Q., Stigler, B., Zhang, A. (2022) Algebraic model selection and experimental design in biological data science. Advances in Applied Mathematics, 133, 102282.

 

Futer, D., Hamilton, E., Hoffman, N. (2022) Infinitely many virtual geometric triangulations. Journal of Topology, 15(4), 2352-2388. 

 

Zhu, W., Khademi, W., Charalampidis, E.G., Kevrekidis, P.G. (2022) Neural networks enforcing physical symmetries in nonlinear dynamical lattices: The case example of the Ablowitz-Ladik model. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 434, 133264.

Mithun, T., Carretero-González R., Charalampidis, E.G., Hall, D.S., Kevrekidis P.G. (2022)

Existence, stability and dynamics of monopole and Alice ring solutions in antiferromagnetic spinor condensates. Physical Review A, 105, 053303.

Jon Chapman, S., Kavousanakis, M., Charalampidis, E.G., Kevrekidis, I.G., Kevrekidis, P.G.
(2022) A spectral analysis of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation in the co-exploding frame.
Physica D, 439, 133396.

 

Grants:
Stathis Charalampidis received the National Science Foundation Collaborative Research Grant: Collapse, Rogue Waves and their Applications: From Theory to Computation and Beyond”, amount: $142,798, September 1, 2022 - August 31, 2025

 

Elena Dimitrova, Joyce Lin, and Paul Anderson (Cal Poly Computer Science Department) received the Data Science Strategic Research Initiative Incubation grant, funded by Cal poly. Amount: $19,603.50, January-June 2022.

 

Joyce Lin and Elena Dimitrova received a Frost Teacher-Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow Award for 2022-2024.

 

Elsa Medina, along with Roy, S., Chance, B., and McGaughey, K. received an NSF grant: “Integrating the statistical investigation process, data visualization, and simulation into high school statistics” Amount: ($449,984). June 2022. 

New Faces: New Faculty and Staff Join Team

Feb 19, 2023

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The Mathematics Department introduced the following faculty and staff members in the 2022-23 academic year, each of whom brings a wealth of experience and educational background. The new members of the team are coming from around the globe.

SABRINA THOMAS

 

Sabrina Thomas

Sabrina Thomas received her bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences from USC, where she assisted with research on the Drosophila life span and worked as a student worker in Payroll. Thomas moved home to Victorville, Calif., after graduating to work as a scribe in the ER at her local community hospital. After 3 years, she moved back to Los Angeles, Calif. to attend Cal State LA where she received her MBA. While working towards her MBA, Thomas worked at an organ procurement organization where she was responsible for auditing organ and tissue donor case files in accordance with organizations’ policies and Federal Regulations. She recently moved to the SLO area and has enjoyed working in the Math Department and the lack of LA traffic.

Sean Gasiorek

Sean Gasiorek (re)joined the mathematics faculty in Fall 2022. After receiving his B.S. and M.S. from Cal Poly in 2009 and 2011, respectively, he served as a Lecturer in the department until 2013. In 2019, he earned his Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz studying the intersection of dynamical systems and geometry under Richard Montgomery. He also spent the Fall 2018 semester at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, CA as part of the Hamiltonian systems, from topology to applications through analysis program.

 

Sean’s research then took him to a three-year postdoctoral position at the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia, where he studied integrable systems and billiards within confocal quadrics with Milena Radnović. His research interests lie in understanding the dynamical properties of mathematical billiards in various physical and geometric settings, particularly its interplay with integrable systems, electricity and magnetism, and its connections to celestial mechanics.

 

Outside of math, he enjoys running, mountain biking, doing yoga, and playing basketball, and looks forward to re-integrating into the Cal Poly and greater SLO community.

Patrick Orson

Patrick grew up in Winchester near the south coast of England. He got his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Cambridge, then received a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He has held postdoctoral positions at: Durham (UK), University Quebec, Boston College, ETH Zurich and the Max Planck Institute in Bonn (Germany). These were a mixture of research and teaching positions. Patrick’s research area is Geometry/Topology, specialising in the geometric topology of 4-dimensional shapes, and Knot Theory. Patrick is excited to join the Cal Poly community and settle down in the beautiful Central Coast.

 

Warren Roche

Warren Roche is the new Frost Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Cal Poly in the Mathematics Department working with Elena Dimitrova and Joyce Lin, and is originally from Waterford, Ireland. Warren has worked as a mathematics and statistics lecturer previously at the South East Technological University in Ireland, and also has extensive statistical experience in clinical trial research and pharmaceutical manufacturing.

 

Warren joined the Mathematics Department in Fall 2022. He originally earned his BSc in Mathematics from Trinity College Dublin in 2012. After spending several years teaching high school and college-level mathematics and physics, he attended University College Dublin to earn a MSc in Mathematical Science in 2016. In 2022, Warren earned his doctorate in Mathematics from the South East Technological University in Waterford, Ireland, where he was a PhD Scholar. Warren's doctoral work explored differential equations and modelling preferential finger flow through a porous media using hysteresis operators and operator splitting techniques. In July 2022, Warren was presented with the Howard Medal at the Brain and Ocular Nutrition Conference at University of Cambridge for his presentation on the importance of effect sizes for clinical trial experiments.  

 

Currently, Warren’s research is in mathematical biology, where he explores the use of agent-based modelling as a tool to develop a deeper understanding of how electrical activity propagates through cardiac tissue. 

 

Letter from the Chair 2023

Feb 19, 2023

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Alumni and friends of the Mathematics Department,

There have been a number of changes around here over the last year (quite apart from the upcoming change to semesters, which drives most of our recent faculty meetings). First our Administrative Coordinator Kara Hahlbeck was promoted to personnel analyst which involved a move across the building to the Dean’s office. If you swing by the office now, you’ll meet our new Administrative Coordinator Sabrina Thomas. Sabrina, who graduated from USC with a Bachelor’s degree in biology and Cal State LA with her MBA, comes to us by way of the ONELEGACY company in Los Angeles where she served as donor information coordinator. Together with Melissa Sunata, Sabrina is doing a great job keeping the office running. 

Among the faculty we had three professors retire after Spring 2022: Matthew White, Linda Patton, and Marian Robbins all decided to hang up the chalk and are currently enjoying the freedom to pursue other interests. Additionally, Professor Stan Yoshinobu was offered a job at the University of Toronto and elected to make the move official. But don’t worry that our ranks our being depleted. Anticipating these departures, we were able to hire two new faculty members, Sean Gasiorek and Patrick Orson, who started this past Fall are currently in the midst of a search for another math ed specialist to join us in Fall 2023, and expect to pursue an additional hire next academic year. Watch this space for introductions.

The department is also hosting a post-doctorate for the first time ever. Professors Joyce Lin and Elena Dimitrova wrote a successful proposal to the Frost fund to support a two-year position, and invited Warren Roche to join the department in Fall 2022 right after finishing his PhD at the Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland. Finally, we also hired one new full-time lecturer, Marvin McClendon, by way of a long career starting with a Ph.D. from Princeton, including a full professorship at Savannah College of Art and Design, stops in China and Dubai, and most recently the University of North Georgia.

All these new staff and faculty are helping us maintain the mathematical life and educational mission of the department. As well as active individual research programs, we provide rich coursework, supervise successful student research, and support both faculty and student travel to math conferences. So many of these activities are made possible by the generous donations to the department. These allow us to fund important initiatives that take place outside the classroom. We are incredibly grateful for the flexibility and opportunity provided by your generous gifts.

Please keep in touch and let us know what you’ve been up to. We'd love to see you at the department office if you're ever on campus.
 

Cal Poly Math Students Win Top Honor in Prestigious International Math Competition

Feb 19, 2023

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Photo 1: Cal Poly students Madison Lytle, Trevor Loe and Callan Whitney (from left to right) excelled at the international 2022 Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) competition.

By Nick Wilson

 

After four days of intense focus that students compared to the feverish energy of a hackathon, a Cal Poly team of three undergraduates emerged from a renowned international math competition as the top U.S. team and honored among the best in the world.  

The team of two math majors — Madison Lytle (double majoring in aerospace engineering) and Trevor Loe (double majoring in physics) — and Callan Whitney (aerospace engineering) competed in the February 2022 Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) competition among thousands to tackle the question: “What is the best way for a cyclist to exert their energy over the course of a race?” 

Working on little sleep on the Cal Poly campus in the Statistics Department Conference Room in Building 25 — grabbing food and showers when they could between Feb. 16 and Feb. 20, 2022 — they finished among the best in the world in the Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications (COMAP) contest. 

The result of their 25-page entry titled “Applying Optimal Control with SQP to Cycling Performance Represented by Constituent Course Elements” was the top U.S. result in their competition category and they finished as a team finalist, earning an Outstanding Award in their problem category, among thousands of international competitors.

“This is the best result for a Cal Poly team in over 20 years,” said Dr. Charles D. Camp, Cal Poly professor of Mathematics and MCM advisor.

This year, the student trio received an award from the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) for their outstanding submission, ranking in the Top 29 of approximately 15,000 teams that participated in the competition overall.

The Cal Poly team competed in a real-world modeling challenge among MAA college-level peers from across the U.S. and a host of other countries (the other top-ranking teams in their category were from China).

 

The Cal Poly math competition team displays their poster at the Fall Math Symposium.

 

Not only was the Cal Poly group’s submission a finalist, a level only 2% of submissions achieved, but their report was chosen by the MAA as the best submission for their problem.

 “Their work demonstrated creativity and a deep understanding of the modeling process via their formulation, implementation and analysis of a mathematical model that addressed the given contest question.”

Camp noted that in the year 2000 when a Cal Poly team won an award for an outstanding entry, the competition had 496 teams overall, signifying the elevated competitiveness of the event now.

To determine the optimal energy output of a professional cyclist, the Cal Poly student team considered several variables such as human biology (anaerobic biology), uphill versus downhill grades, drag, and race-track conditions such as curvature and course topography.  

Modern power monitoring systems can be mounted on a bike allow riders to track their power output during the race and make informed adjustments about improving pacing.  

The group’s analysis laid out formulas, models and conclusions about optimal cycling power output to accomplish the fastest possible results in professional races.  

“Madison and I are both are into a lot of applied math work going on at Cal Poly,” said Loe, a double major in physics. “We were able to get a sense of what using the math that we’ve learned feels like.” 

Because of variables such as a cyclist’s biological makeup and ability to store energy, along with course conditions such as hills and headwinds, they used sequential quadratic programming (SQP), a mathematical method used to solve a sequence of optimization subproblems, to generate numerical solutions.   

They proposed a method of optimizing cycling power output over subsections of tracks, called course elements, that may be concatenated (linked in a chain or series) into complex tracks. 

“Whatever parameters you use to represent the rider’s specific biology, there are certain interactions that are nonlinear,” said Lytle, a double major in aerospace engineering. “And that basically just makes them a lot more difficult to optimize and deal with numerically.” 

The study involved assessments of three tracks — the Tokyo Olympic Time Trial course, the UCI World Championships in Belgium and a constructed square course consisting of four rises and falls with a mathematically imposed radius of curvature of 10 meters around each bend. 

“The objective was not necessarily the model output, but the fact that the model is going to work,” Lytle said. “That’s so we can take into account these anaerobic effects because we can implement them in the model.” 

Among their conclusions:  

 

• the optimal strategy involves operating close to max power above one’s critical power (or highest average power you can sustain) during steep inclines, and dropping power output down as much as possible during downhills to recover  
• for courses with more variation in grade, model outputs recommend operating more reactively to the course features; alternatively, a flatter course prompts a pace which stays close to critical power at all times 
• due consideration should be taken into the environmental “perturbations” of the course, chiefly a strong headwind and the locations of sharp turns. If a headwind is greater than 15 meters per second, model outputs indicate that changing power output reactively to the wind, rather than staying consistent, will lower track times. 

 

The students were not allowed any faculty guidance during the competition.  

“Surprisingly, some of my physics classes were really helpful for some of the math, specifically optimization, which some physics classes, especially like classical mechanics, use,” Loe said. 

Lytle echoed her teammates assessment that skill sets in multiple disciplines helped.   

“Trevor and I are both double majors and Callan is an aerospace engineering major,” Lytle said. “We’ve learned a lot about drag in aerospace engineering classes.” 

Loe added: “With this competition, one of the hardest parts is deciding basically infinite things that you could account for and what to include and what to ignore. It was fun and a great experience to use math to solve a real-world problem.”