Carnegie Mellon University

Meeting of the Minds

Poster Competition: past winners

This competition is sponsored by the Department of Mathematical Sciences, through the generosity of alumnus David Simmons. Its purpose is to encourage undergraduate projects and research in mathematics, and to educate the CMU community about the wide range of opportunities in mathematics.

The competition is open to any student who has completed a project that has significant mathematical content. Students must be enrolled at CMU as undergraduates in the spring semester of previous year. A panel of judges will rate the projects to the following criteria: quality of abstract, clarity of objective, organization of thoughts, general quality of work, significance of work, oral presentation skills, visual presentation quality, novel and/or appropriate use of mathematical methods, responses to questions.

2020

David Simmons Prize for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics
Fei Peng
What can you draw?

Runners-up
Max Aires
On the number of edges in a maximally linkless graph

Fei Peng - What can you draw?

(What can you draw? - Fei Peng)

Philip Lamkin
Log-convexity of moments of averages

Noah Stevenson
Characterizations of screened Sobolev spaces

2019

David Simmons Prize for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics
Emily Zhu
Multicolor Ramsey Numbers for Small Hypergraphs

Honorable Mentions
Alp Müyesser
Unavoidable Colorful Patterns in Graphs

Xinyu Wu
A Log-Sobolev Inequality for the Multislice, with Applications

Annie Xu
Traces for Homogeneous Sobolev Spaces in Infinite Cylindrical Domains

Young Researcher Award
Laura Li & Lily Qiao
➤ Portfolio Optimization with Order Size Impact

2018

David Simmons Prize for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics
Zachary Singer
Sparse Polynomial Approximations with Unknown Random Sampling

Second Place
Matthew Bowen
The Sprague-Grundy Function for Some Selective Compound Games

On the Sprague-Grundy Values of Auxiliary-Nim

(The Sprague-Grundy Function for Some Selective Compound Games - Matthew Bowen)

Third Place (Tie)
Sidhanth Mohanty (CS major)
Sum-of-Squares Refutation Threshold for Regular SORT_4 Instances

Nicholas Sieger
Cycle Double Covers

Young Researcher Award
Zizhuo Chen, David Xu, Yuzhi Guo and Anni Huang
Utility Optimization in the Agency Problem

2017

David Simmons Prize for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics
Sam Zbarsky
Energy Decay in a Fluid with a Free Boundary

Runner-up
Ananya Kumar (CS major)
Streaming Algorithms for Approximate Convex Hulls

Honorable Mentions
Manuel Fernandez
Online Purchasing of Minimal Spanning Trees

Liuyu Jin
Existence, Uniqueness and Asymptotic Behavior of Solutions to a Linear System of PDEs with Weak Viscoelastic Damping

Tim Li
L1 Regularization for Compact Support

2016

First Place: Mathematics Poster
Jackson Bahr (2017)
Subrings of C Generated by Angles

Honorable Mentions: Mathematics Poster
Keven Chionh (2018), Liuyu Jin (2018)
Brachistichrone Problem in Non-uniform Gravitational Fields

Weichen Yin (2016)
Twinning conditions in Austenite-Martensite Phase Transitions

2015

First Place: Mathematics Poster
Philip Garrison (2016)
Good Graph Hunting

Honorable Mentions: Mathematics Poster
David Mehrle (2015), Tomer Reiter (2015)
Newman’s Conjecture in Function Fields

Nicholas Takaki (2015)
Image Segmentation with Dynamic Artifacts Detection and Bias Correction

Jeremy Meza (2015)
Explicit Bounds for Pseudospectra of Matrices and Operators