Higher School Mathematics

   So, there's the high school mathematics we all know and then there's the mathematics that the students pictured here are doing -- let's call it higher school mathematics!  These students were participating in the AAAS high school poster session, and had the opportunity to attend a conference right along side experts in many areas of science.

    Justin Lozano focused on solving the rubik's cube and variations using a computer programming approach.  Yesterday afternoon, he was among several students whose posters were on display in the exhibit hall.  When we talked about how he might use group theory to think about the rubik's cube, he commented "It's interesting that you think of the problem from a different point of view."

   Aishwarya Vardhana's poster features her work using linear programming methods to create a program that would show a company how to optimize their use of green energies such as wind and solar energy.    And, last but not least...

Varuna Rao worked on facial recognition.  She created a database with photographs for reference, and then wrote a computer program that assigns a number to a photo based on certain measurements obtained from the photo and compares different photos by comparing their numbers.  She says that now that she's learned about mathlab, she could see redoing her project using that tool, and that in the future, she would like to use more than one number to compare photos to improve her current recognition rate of 45%.

    Good luck to all of these students!