Research Seminar in Mathematical Modeling

Resources

Journals:

Below is a short list of refereed undergraduate research journals in mathematics and related fields, as a starting point for your search for a journal to submit to. Please don't restrict yourselves to the few journals that were mentioned here. Attempt to submit your work to the most prestigious journal that you believe to be appropriate for your paper.

Refereed Undergraduate Journals

Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Mathematics Journal

FU Electronic Journal of Undergraduate Mathematics

Morehead Journal of Applicable Mathematics

American Journal of Undergraduate Physics Research

Journal of Young Investigators

Berkeley Scientific (not exactly refereed)

Directories of Journals that Consider Undergraduate Work

JYI Directory

A Modeling-Specific Directory

The following is an ever-growing list of helpful resources/programming packages with which you might want to consider taking the time to familiarize yourself. We want to emphasize that these certainly are not the only packages you can use, and you are encouraged to explore other options.

Please email Ephrat if you know of any other resources that should be listed here!

LaTex:

LaTex is a free text formatting language that caters to scientific/mathematical paper writing. It is relatively easy to learn and formats your paper nicely. There are many flavors of LaTex editor available online; if you want one, we suggest MikTex, which is free and wonderful, or PCTex, which gives you a free trial version of its software. Another option is to just try the "latex" or "tex" command on any UNIX machine from the CS department or on your own *nix distribution at home.

Some good LaTeX tutorials you might want to check out:

http://www.tug.org.in/tutorials.html
http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/beginlatex/html/intro.html#intro - this one covers information that the first one did not cover as well.

Here is a sample LaTeX file, written by a former student of the class: exampleTex.tex, and its corresponding pdf: exampleTexPDF.pdf .

Lindo/Lingo:

Lindo is a linear programming package that solves (large) linear programs; in other words, given a linear max/minimization objective function subject to a set of linear constraints, this solver will find the optimal solution as well give you sensitivity analysis data on the decision variables. This package is also free and extremely easy to use.

Download free trial version from: http://www.lindo.com/
Check out Linear Programming FAQ, an extensive guide to linear optimization.

Decision Analysis by TreeAge (DATA):

DATA is a decision analysis package that easily solves complex decision problems under uncertainty. Decision analysis is the study of systematic approaches to decision-making problems; it requires at least a basic understanding of probability. It is not as likely that you will need to use this, but knowledge of general decision-making strategies and problem formulation is beneficial.

Download: DATA student version

Ungzip and untar the file, winzip should be able to do this.
Double-click on setup.exe

If you would like to learn more about formulating and solving such problems, feel free to contact Ephrat, or check out the following:

Probability review (pdf)
Decision Tree Primer

Python:

The simulation for one of the winning Berkeley 2005 MCM papers was coded in Python, an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language with relevant libraries that lend themselves to fast and easy simulations and statistical analysis. Interested students can check out the links below: