Grants Empower Students to Present at Math Symposium

July 12, 2018

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Grants earned by Illinois Wesleyan University Associate Professor of Mathematics Andrew Shallue will enable undergraduate students from across the country – including four from IWU – to attend and present at the 13th Algorithmic Number Theory Symposium (ANTS) held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, July 16-20.

“The students who attend will become acquainted with presenting their work in a professional academic setting,” said Shallue, who sees the symposium as a valuable opportunity for students to develop as researchers, public speakers and mathematicians.

As a co-organizer of ANTS, Shallue applied for and received grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Mathematics Division of the National Security Agency (NSA). The biannual ANTS meetings, which began in 1994, serve as an international forum for highlighting new research involving computational number theory, which is a branch of pure mathematics.

Three pairs of Illinois Wesleyan students submitted their research posters from Shallue’s May Term course “Introduction to Research in Mathematics” to ANTS and were accepted to present their research at the symposium. One or both members of each pair will travel with Shallue to share their work alongside undergraduate, graduate and doctoral mathematicians.

The student presenters include: co-author of “Hidden Forest: Discovering Invisible Squares” Jiayi Li ’19 (Changsha, China), co-author of “A Primorial Approach for Generating Primes” David “Nico” Lopez ’21 (Quito, Ecuador), and co-authors of “Finding Square-Sum Sequences modulo m” Patrick Ward ’20 (Schaumburg, Illinois) and Naing Tun ’20 (Yangon, Myanmar).

Full abstracts for each poster can be found on the ANTS website.

By Rachel McCarthy ’21