Rose Dennis

October 23, 2015

An Introduction to Pure Math Research

This past summer Rose worked in an area of math that she did not have any prior exposure to. She worked with monomials which are polynomials with one term. This is important to the math world because their study can reveal properties of polynomial functions, and we know that polynomials are used to model many real life situations. Her focus was on sets of monomials that satisfy the Borel property, called Borel-fixed sets. She got fairly simple results when investigating the number of Borel-fixed sets of degree d in 2 and 3 variables. There was a strong learning curve that Rose adapted to use the specified terminology and even make her own definitions for the research. She worked with two professors and two peers for about two months. The collaboration was very successful and she is currently in the process of submitting the paper to an academic journal.