On Feb. 16, eight Arcadia University students presented at the Moravian College Undergraduate Mathematics Conference. The day-long conference provides an opportunity for undergraduate college students from the tri-state area to come together to present talks and discuss mathematics, statistics, operations research, and computing.

“For three consecutive years, the conference has featured more presenters from Arcadia University than from any other participating institution,” says Dr. Ned Wolff, Professor of Mathematics. “These same students—and others—will be accompanying me to the Eastern Pennsylvania Delaware chapter of the Mathematics Association of America at Dickinson College on April 6.”

A Statistical Analysis of Data Pertaining to Knee Osteoarthritis

By Arunima Awale and Jennifer Kaiser

We analyzed data collected by faculty from Arcadia’s Physical Therapy Department pertaining to subjects with knee osteoarthritis. The study’s goal was to investigate relationships among several variables including self-reported measures of stiffness, pain, and function; objective measures obtained from pendulum tests; and variables such as velocity and stride length that describe gait characteristics.

Geodesic Graphs, Bipartite Graphs and the Geodetic Number

By Rommy Marquez

I consider geodesic graphs, characterize the graphs whose geodesic graphs are complete bipartite, see when the Cartesian product of two complete bipartite graphs is complete bipartite, and show that the geodetic number of the product of two complete bipartite graphs, Km,n and Kr,s where m,n,r,s ≥ 4, is 8.

Qualitative Techniques in Modeling

By Lauren Ellenberg

I explain a paper by Benardete et al on qualitative techniques for analyzing periodic solutions and bifurcations and present a small result related to the relationship between growth rate, harvesting rate, and population extinction in the periodically harvested logistic equation.

Pervasive Fall Detection Using Mobile Phones

By Fred Bastian and William Lariccia

This talk discusses the current research regarding mobile phone-based fall detection. Observing that independent systems can become too costly and current phone-dependent systems are too imprecise, we proposed to design a mobile phone-based fall detection system using data-mining techniques. We will present our preliminary work, including data collection and an improvement of the iFall system.

An Introduction to Statistical Permutation Tests

By Zachary Baker and Harrison Stoll

Some leading statisticians believe that many traditional statistical techniques (including, for example, t-tests to compare two means) are archaic and, given the computing power now available, should be replaced by resampling methods including permutation and bootstrapping techniques. This talk introduces these techniques and points out their advantages over traditional methods.