In Brief: Texas State Mathworks HSMC teams fare well at Siemens competition

By Rayn Thornton
Office of Media Relations
October 28, 2015

Four research teams that attended Texas State University’s 2015 Mathworks Honors Summer Math Camp (HSMC) program have been recognized at the national Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology.

The teams started their work during the six weeks of the program and continued their research projects after it concluded. The focus of their projects ranged from abstract mathematics to computer science modeling.

Three of these four teams were mentored by Texas State professors and one by a St. Edward's University professor. One team is advancing as regional finalists for a chance to compete nationally. Team members Eric Li, David Xiang and Amber Lu were mentored by Lucas Rusnak of the Texas State mathematics department. Their project title is "Signed Path Matrices and Oriented Hypergraphic Generalizations.”

The other three were semifinalists. The teams are: 

  • Lillian Bu, Michelle Hamilton and Nina Osipova - mentored by Ziliang Zong of the Texas State computer science department; project titled "Energy-Aware Deep Learning for Image Recognition”
  • Hans Li, William Liu and Kevin Rao - mentored by Edward Early at St. Edward's; project titled "A Combinatorial Proof for the Rank-Unimodality of Poset Order Ideals"
  • Christine Jou and Yagmur Yuksel - mentored by Ray Treinen of the Texas State mathematics department; project titled ”Clusters of Floating and Sessile Drops in the Absence of Gravity”

Texas State’s HSMC is an immersive multi-summer program for high school students, preparing them for degrees and careers in math, science, engineering and many other fields.

The Siemens Competition recognized only 422 students of the more than 1,700 who submitted research projects this year. The Siemens Competition offers scholarship awards from $1,000 to $100,000 to winning high school students. The competition is the flagship of the Siemens Foundation, an organization that has invested more than $90 million in the United States to advance workforce development and education initiatives in science, technology, engineering and math.

For more information about HSMC, visit www.txstate.edu/mathworks/camps/hsmc.html. For information about the Siemens Foundation and Competition, visit www.siemens-foundation.org.