BOLIVAR, Mo.— Southwest Baptist University student Julie Anne Bowman, a mathematics major from Franklin, N.C., presented a talk at the 12th MAKO Undergraduate Math Research Conference held Saturday, Nov. 12, at Missouri State University.
The conference featured presentations by undergraduate students from Missouri, Arkansas,
Kansas and Oklahoma about mathematics research they had accomplished. The conference
was co-hosted by area institutions including Missouri State University, SBU, College
of the Ozarks, Drury University and Evangel University.
Bowman’s talk, “The Game of Seepage,” featured results from her Research Experience for Undergraduates in mathematics (REU) during the summer of 2016 at Michigan State University. The REU was funded by the National Science Foundation as well as the National Security Agency.
Seepage is a variation of the Cops and Robbers game in mathematics that was created in 2008, Bowman said. Bowman and her REU group came up with an algorithm that tells who the winner of the game on a certain graph will be if played by two highly intelligent people. Because the algorithm runs out of memory with big graphs, they found ways to reduce the size of the graph while still maintaining the winner of the game.
Allison Hawkins also attended the conference, as well as professors of mathematics Dr. Stephen Bowling and Dr. Kevin Hopkins.
Bowman and Nicholas Lindell, from the University of Georgia, were accepted to the Undergraduate Student Poster Session and the Graph Theory Session at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Atlanta in January 2017. The two were on the same REU group last summer and will be presenting their research on Seepage.
For more information about the department of mathematics, contact Hopkins at (417) 328-1675 or khopkins@SBUniv.edu.