Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Bryan Dorner
dornerbc@plu.edu
Some capstones can deal with the intersection of computers and mathematics. Capstones
along this line can take many forms.
1. Famous problems.
The Four Color Theorem. This theorem says that you only need 4 colors to color
any map so that adjacent countries have different colors. The only proofs known
require a computer to check all the possibilities. The big ideas in the proof and a
complete proof of the 5 color theorem have made good capstones in the past.
The Halting Problem. This problem from theoretical computer science says that
its impossible to write a computer program that takes as input any other computer
program and outputs whether or not that other program will terminate after a
finite number of steps. The ideas a somewhat similar to Goedels proof that there
are statements that are true, but cannot be proved, and also to proofs that there are
numbers that cannot be computed.
2. Games and Puzzles. Sudoku has become a very popular pastime. One way to really
understand the strategies would be to write a computer program to solve (and then to
generate) such puzzles. A capstone would require presenting the logic of such a
solution clearly and engagingly.
3. Algorithms
In the past, two students worked on methods for factoring large integers which
lies at the heart of efforts to break the RSA security code. There are other
methods which they did not cover.
You could work on historical and new methods for computing square and
higher roots as well as values of trig functions.I know a non-standard way of
computing sine, cosine, sinh, and cosh that suggests a geometric way to
approach the CORDIC method of computing these functions that is simpler
than the approach usually given. (Many calculators use the CORDIC
method.)
Graph Theory
o Maximum Matchings for Complete, Multipartite Graphs
o Developing Algorithms for Finding Hamiltonian Cycles in Complete,
Multipartite Graphs
o Ramsey Theory
o The Optimal Pebbling Number for Various Graphs
o The Four Color Theorem
o Shortest Path Algorithms
Matrix Theory
o Who is #1? Ranking Round Robin Tournaments
o An Introduction to Subspace Iteration and the QR Algorithm
o Homotopy Methods for Finding Eigenvalues of Tridiagonal Matrices
o Generalized Inverses and Least Squares
o Markov Chains and the Perron-Frobenius Theorem
Mathematical Statistics
o AR(p) Models in Time Series
o Logistic Regression and Categorical Data Analysis
o Improved Confidence Intervals for Binomial Probabilities
o Surveys and Stratified Sampling
o Probability, Blackjack and Card Counting
Combinatorics
o Generalizations of Pascals Triangle
Optimization
o Three Interior Point Methods and Their Performance on Small, Dense
Problems
o The Traveling Salesman Problem
o Lemkes Algorithm
Financial Mathematics
Anne Cook
cookaw@plu.edu