University of Richmond Athletics
Wo Men's Lacrosse: Summer Adventure Series No. 2
08/12/2013 | Women's Lacrosse
Summer Spider Adventures: A series detailing some of our Spider's summer adventures. Follow these posts to learn more about a few Spiders and what they have been up to this summer!
Summer Spider Adventures 2: Erin Marie Geoghan conducts summer research for esteemed UR fellowship.
Whenever we send some sort of message over a line of communication, such as a text or email, there are factors that disrupt the message, possibly changing pieces of it. The study of coding theory uses mathematics and computer science to explore various ways to create codes that help to secure lines of communication and correct errors that occur.
This summer I participated in a ten-week internship completing math research with a concentration on coding theory for Dr. Davis at the University of Richmond. The students on Dr. Davis's research team took part in a three-part process of research. The first couple weeks consisted of learning the basics of coding theory and ensuring everyone was on the same page with their base knowledge. The next several weeks were purely focused on cranking out problems and working towards solving the new problems defined at the beginning of the summer. The group that I gravitated into was working on finding difference sets. Difference sets, also being studied by the National Security Agency, are mathematically infeasible to find by guessing and help aid the study of coding theory. After making great progress with the difference sets, we left the last two weeks to writing up the information we found and constructing a presentation to give to other math and computer science professors and researchers.
I learned a lot from this experience and in the end my research team was able to find difference sets that have never been found before using a programming language called GAP, which we also had to learn to use this summer. I really enjoyed working in my group as we learned together how to navigate our differences and also collaborate on our major presentation. I will be continuing research with Dr. Davis for partial credit this year and hope to make more strides in that area of math.
Below is a slide from Geoghan's fellowship.
