Math Undergraduates Publish Research

Along with Professor and Chair of Mathematics and Computer Science Mikhail Ostrovskii, Ph.D., undergraduate Mathematics majors Seychelle Khan and Mutasim Mim have an accepted publication to the forthcoming volume, The Mathematical Legacy of Victor Lomonosov (De Gruyter).

The publication stems from Dr. Ostrovskii’s National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research on embeddings of discrete metric spaces into Banach spaces, which has applications in theoretical computer science and topology. The grant funds have allowed Khan and Mim to become involved with the research, and together they have investigated the research question: In what situations can the cost of a combination of transportation problems be significantly smaller than the sum of the costs? This topic is of current research interest because of its relationship to fundamental problems in analysis, the theory of metric embeddings, and computer science.

These results have attracted the attention of experts in computer science and mathematics: Dr. Ostrovskii has been invited to speak on the research he has done in collaboration with Khan and Mim at various meetings, including the Simons Collaboration on Algorithms and Geometry, the Geometric Functional Analysis and Probability Seminar at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and the Colloquium of the Department of Mathematics at Miami University.

“I was invited to this research after taking Advanced Calculus,” said Khan, “and it gave me the opportunity to learn more about a subject I was really starting to like.”

Khan and Mim – both seniors – are applying to graduate programs in mathematics.