SPRING 2008

<>Juliette Zerick became the first student to graduate with Honors in both the Matematics department and the Computer Science department. She wrote a thesis titled Computational Characterizations of Basin Boundaries. She studied a competition model that describes two species of flour beetle with a set of nonlinear dynamical equations, which exhibits chaotic behavior and fractal basins of attraction when multiple chaotic attractors are present. Because these fractal basins require an enormous amount of data to be rendered, Juliette concluded that all of the necessary information is contained in the boundaries of the basins which are significantly smaller than the entire basins. She wrote a Java applet to render the basin boundaries which can be viewed by clicking on the image below.