Alumnus of Mathematics Department Published In Research Journal

Research by recent alumnus Matthew Lukac has been published in the latest issue of the Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Mathematics Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2.

His honors thesis, "Continuously Diagonalizing the Shape Operator,” under the direction of Phil Harrington, associate professor of mathematics, investigates the behavior of the curvature of non-developable surfaces around an umbilic point at the origin and proves that a continuously diagonalizable shape operator implies the existence of a path through the origin with noncomparable principal curvatures.

Last spring, Lukac presented the same thesis at the 76th Annual Meeting of the Oklahoma-Arkansas Section of the Mathematical Association of America and received third place for “Best Presentation.”

"Matt is a hard-working student who brought a lot of creativity and enthusiasm to his research.” Harrington said.  “He should be very successful in graduate school."

Lukac graduated summa cum laude in 2014 with degrees in mathematics and physics. He is currently taking a year off before attending graduate school where plans to earn a doctorate in mathematics and teach at a research university. He is a mathematics tutor with the Enhanced Learning Center.

"We are very proud of Matt and all the successes of the mathematics majors at the University of Arkansas," Chaim Goodman-Strauss, department chair said.

Originally from Mountain Home, he is the first in his family to graduate college with honors, much less the first to be published in an academic research journal.

“Coming from a small town, having this much success in academia, at least for someone with my background, seemed so far out of reach,” Lukac said. “Already, it feels quite addicting and I hope to carry this success into graduate school and beyond.”

The Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Mathematics Journal is sponsored by the Mathematics Department at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and is devoted entirely to papers written by undergraduates on topics related to mathematics. In order to maintain a high level of exposition, each paper must be sponsored by a mathematician familiar with the student's work and each paper is refereed.