St. Norbert College Students Present at 2018 Mathfest

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From St. Norbert College, September 11, 2018
by Hailey Barron, hailey.barron@snc.edu, 920-403-3089

Three St. Norbert College Poss-Wroble Undergraduate Research Fellows presented their summer research at Mathfest, the annual meeting of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and the national mathematics honor society Pi Mu Epsilon, Aug. 1-4 in Denver, Colo.
The students, mentored by members of the St. Norbert College math faculty during an eight-week on-campus research program over the summer, include:
Allison Gerk (Tinley Park, Ill.)
Gerk, a junior at St. Norbert College, presented “Columnaris Disease and the Population Dynamics of Infected Fish” under the direction of Terry Jo Leiterman. Gerk won the Janet L. Andersen Award for Outstanding Student Exposition and Research in Mathematical or Computational Biology presented by BioSIGMAA, a special interest group of the MAA.
Mark Nichols (Hartford, Wis.)

Nichols, a junior at St. Norbert College, presented “Examples of Graphs that Admit No Normal Nonabelian Sylow p-Subgroup” under the direction of Jacob Laubacher.

Bao Van (Vietnam, now residing in Green Bay, Wis.)
Van, a senior at St. Norbert College, presented “Probabilities of Rank 3 Simple Matroids” under the direction of Simon Pfeil. Van was recognized with a national Pi Mu Epsilon speaker award.

Over 250 undergraduate students from across the nation presented their research findings in judged sessions at the 2018 MathFest conference.

Mathematics professor Rick Poss, who retired from St. Norbert College in 2012 after a 42-year distinguished career, began taking St. Norbert College students to Mathfest in 1985. Ed Wroble, a student of Poss who graduated from St. Norbert College in 1974 with a mathematics degree, endowed a math fund so St. Norbert College students could do summer research and attend Mathfest to present their findings each year.
For more information, contact Terry Jo Leiterman, associate professor of mathematics, at terryjo.leiterman@snc.edu.