2024 Day of Giving

Support our student researchers!

To honor the memory of Professor Rick Scott, we have established a Rick Scott Memorial Scholar program. Donations to the Alexanderson-Pennello Fund given in Rick Scott's name will help support one student-faculty team each summer to carry out original research. Last summer we supported seven student researchers through Alexanderson-Pennello! We hope that you can help us maintain this fund. We also welcome donations to the general Math/CS Gift Fund, which has been especially useful for working to create a greater sense of community in the department..

Frank Farris
Professor and Chair of Math and Computer Science

Thanks to the Alexanderson-Pennello Fund...

— The inaugural Rick Scott Memorial Scholars, Tong (Ben) Chen, Jingxuan (Paisley) Hou, and Yanni (Rebecca) Zhu, worked with faculty Frank Farris and Reza Shariatmadari on a project called “The Artistic Potential of the Bessel Functions,” and presented their work at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January 2024.

— SCU students Nikolaus Elsaesser, Stephen Gibson, and Junhyun Lim were able to work with Associate Professor Sara Krehbiel and fellow faculty member Howard Levinson to better understand the structure of graph coloring reconfiguration systems.

— SCU math major Claire Murphy, along with professors Tamsen McGinley and Glenn Appleby, were able to spend the summer exploring and explaining computer algebra methods to study abstract algebra. "We were able to study good methods for using Galois Groups to compute the structure of fields and to explain the symmetries of polynomial roots."

— SCU math major Jonas Fahrney and professor Glenn Appleby were able to find elegant ways to compute invariants of Lie algebra representations, used in abstract algebra and in physics.