International SURF with Senior, Alp Müyesser
When Müyesser, a native of Istanbul, entered Carnegie Mellon, he did so as a student in College of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
“I realized quickly it wasn’t for me.”
Instead, through his first-year classes, he found himself drawn to mathematics and particularly a field known as Ramsey Theory.
“The catchphrase for the field could be ʻcomplete chaos is impossible,ʼ” Müyesser described. “It is completely opposed to anything I would have thought of as math from my high school background.”
Essentially, Ramsey Theory looks at the conditions that mean “order” that must exist in a certain set, whether that be a group of numbers or even a collection of people.
“If a system you’re looking at is large enough, orderly substructures will form,” Müyesser said.
As a senior, Müyesser is looking forward to continuing in academia and mathematical research. “I’m confident that I will want to do this for a long time,” he said.
Along with rock climbing, one of Müyesser̓s favorite extracurricular activities is just walking around the campus and the city, he said. Even then, math is never far from his mind.
“It’s a good way to do homework,” Müyesser noted of his time walking, in which he can think through equations in his head. “It̓s easier not to get distracted.”
Summer 2018 Math SURF Research Projects
David Altizio, Xinyu Wu and
Taisuke Yasuda
Asymptotic Stability of the Faraday Wave Problem
Advisor: Ian Tice
Bryan Ding and Zilin Wang
Constructing Local Volatility Surfaces to Price Options
Advisor: Elnur Emrah
Wenxin Ding
Does Gaussian Noise Increase Entropy?
Advisor: Tomasz Tkocz
Shuyang (Serena) Gao and Novdano Dede Yusuf
Assessment of Discrete and Continuous Time Models for Pricing Options
Advisor: David Handron
Varun Gudibanda
Dynamics of the Inextensible Inverted Flag with Piston-Theoretic Forcing Term
Advisor: Jason Howell
Yong Gun Choe
Hidden Markov Model and Its Applications to Stock Price Prediction
Advisor: Yu Gu
Zhiyang He
Hypergraphs with Few Berge Paths of Fixed Length Between Vertices
Advisor: Michael Tait
Ruoyuan Liu and Yuepeng Yang
Recognizing Mesh Structure in Images
Advisor: Dejan Slepčev
(Background image)
Jung Joo Suh
Line Sections and Graph Homomorphisms for Graphs Induced by Actions of the Integer Lattice
Advisor: Clinton Conley
Emily Zhu
Multicolor Ramsey Numbers for Small Hypergraphs
Advisor: Tom Bohman
Meeting of the Minds Poster Competition
First Place — 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
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
Other Math Major Award Winners:
First place in the Statistics Poster Competition
Chi Fang
Predicting Delay in Freight Transportation through Socioeconomic Events
(Joint with Yudi Jin, Frank Kovacs and Maria Rodriguez de la Cruz)
Dietrich Humanities Award
Ruth Scherr
Laborious
Honorable Mention in the Statistics Poster Competition
Qiuyu Wang
Assessing the Performance of the False Discovery Rate Procedure in Detecting Cointegrating Stock Pairs
(Joint with Emily Chen, Christian Manaog and Boyan Zhang)