The first-ever Seattle University Mathematics Super Special Senior Synthesis Symposium (SUMSSSSS) was held last Thursday. The event provided an opportunity for seniors in the math department to present the research projects they had worked on throughout the year. Senior synthesis projects are completed as part of a two-credit class in the fall, two credits in the winter and one credit in the spring.
Ashley Esperanza, a fourth-year mathematics major, worked on a project related to the mathematics of knots. The result consisted of a playable puzzle computer game.
“The user is given a knot diagram, a mosaic knot diagram, and they’re tasked by changing the crossings in the knot to get the end configuration, the unknot, which is just a circle,” Esperanza said.
Allison Heinrich, professor of mathematics and advisor for the senior synthesis projects, specializes in knot theory.
“A knot from a mathematician’s perspective is a knotted up circle sitting in space, and there’s a lot of theory that’s been developed around, like ‘If I give you a knot, can you tell me what kind of knot it is?’” Heinrich said. “A big project that mathematicians worked on for the last hundred years was classifying the knots.”
Working with Heinrich, Esperanza developed an algorithm that can identify the unknot for a given knot. Heinrich worked to create SUMSSSSS this year. Students have given final talks for 16 years, but only this year have the talks been organized into one singular community event.
“I thought we should have a mini-conference for seniors,” Heinrich said. “Everyone gave 20-minute talks, and we had breakfast, snacks and a party afterwards. I kind of replicated what a professional conference would be like.”
Watching students transition their projects from a pure concept to a prepared presentation was very fulfilling for Heinrich, who met with student groups throughout the year to assist their work.
“With most of them we would meet every week,” Heinrich said. “It was a collaboration, but they were also supposed to drive the research in the work outside of our meetings.”
Nhi Tran, a fourth-year mathematics and computer science major, presented a project about the uses of Markov chains at the event.
“A Markov chain is gonna have a set of states and then the transitions between the states. You want to model something, the probability of the next state is going to be only based on the previous state,” Tran said.
Markov chains were identified as useful by Tran for optimizing search engine results and mapping DNA.
“In the previous years, they didn’t have the whole day of events like this; they just had a week and then had a couple of talks, so this is pretty cool because we can watch all the people talk,” Tran said.
Heinrich’s primary intent is to provide students experience with the format of a conference.
“That’s my number one goal with this class: to develop transferable skills. You probably won’t use knot theory in your job after you graduate, but you will use perseverance, the ability to persevere on a hard project that doesn’t go the right way. You will definitely use speaking and writing skills. There are a lot of soft skills, communication skills and technical skills,” Heinrich said.
She had her students learn the technical writing software LawTech.
Heinrich is very happy with the first SUMSSSSS event, and plans to host it again next year when she teaches the senior synthesis class again. The event serves as a day to celebrate the accomplishments of the seniors.
