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Contact: Melissa Peveto
News Bureau
Northwestern State University
Natchitoches, LA 71497
(318) 357-6466
3/17/98
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NATCHITOCHES -Seven Northwestern State University students along with faculty from the math department recently attended the annual meeting of the Louisiana-Mississippi Section of the Mathematical Association of America in New Orleans.
Students, in groups of four, took a test during the student team competition. NSU's team consisted of Tammy Bordelon of Houma, Ben Cannon of Houma , Matt Creighton of Natchitoches and Theresa Yousey of Natchitoches. The team placed 8th out of 26 teams from Louisiana and Mississippi.
The section also sponsors a student paper competition. Students who enter this competition submit a six page paper about their research in mathematics and describe their results in a 10 minute oral presentation. Charles Anderson of Natchitoches, Martha Cecchini of Natchitoches, David Penton of Mesquite, Texas and Yousey made presentations. Yousey was awarded first place in the competition for her presentation "Minimizing drain time," where she researched to find which shape allows water to drain fastest from a container.
Bruce Reznick from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Illinois, Urbana, made a presentation at a luncheon attended by the students which was entitled "Fun with Generating Functions."
Faculty members attending included Dr. Lisa Galminas, Dr. Richard DeVault, Tommy Covington, Dr. Stan Chadick, Kathleen Chadick, Dr. Frank Serio, Dr. Ben Rushing and Dr. Leigh Ann Myers.
Galminas presentation was entitled "Speed-up Properties for Innumerable Vector Spaces" which dealt with her research areas involving the computability theory and applications of the computability theory.
DeVault gave a paper on "The Global Stabilities of a Difference Equation" which centered on his on-going work on a class of difference equations about which certain properties have been observed through computer analysis.
During the meeting, Myers was elected secretary/treasurer of the section while Dr. Chadick was nominated for governor of the section. Elections will take place later this spring.