Ranking Similarity between Political Speechesusing Naive Bayes Text Classification
James Ryder, Sen Zhang

Set of N authors - We are given a snippet of text said to be written by one of the authors in the set of authors (categories). This text classification system should attempt to predict which author is most likely to have written the snippet of text. In the training phase, we need to obtain samples of the writing for each author in the category (author) set.

Thompson's Group and the Four Color Theorem
Garry Bowlin

Every map in the plane (or on the sphere) can be colored with just four colors such that no two adjacent countries have the same color. First stated by Francis Guthrie in 1852. First proofs submited by Kemp in 1879 and Tait in 1880. Both proofs were shown to be incorrect, more than ten years after they were submitted. First correct proof by Haken and Appel used computers to verify the 4CT in 1977.

Design of Astronomical Instruments as a Bridge between Theory and Practice
Toke Knudsen

In Fall 2010 the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Statistics offered the course Special Topics in Mathematical Astronomy which was an introduction to the history of the astral sciences from ancient Mesopotamia to Copernicus. Beginning with astronomical records kept by Babylonian priests, the history and development of astronomy is traced with emphasis on the role of both mathematics and observation in the formation of astronomical theories and models. During the course, Babylonian arithmetical models for planetary motion, Greek epicyclical models, calendars, and computations of lunar eclipses are examined.

Chess Snapshots from 1895-1972
Robert Sulman

By the end of the 19th century, the principles of Wilhelm Steinitz were fast becoming accepted by the top players of the day. A more scientific approach was now put into practice in which "positional" ideas were as important as the tactical themes that were frequently the primary consideration during the swashbuckling earlier years of competition.

Using and Creating Automatically Generated PowerPoint Slides to Facilitate Teaching of Data Structures and Algorithms
Sen Zhang

We present an on-going, long-term, coding-intensive project that aims to facilitate teaching of Data Structures and Algorithms (DSAs) using automatically generated PowerPoint slides. The poster will present the following information: the motivation, design, two-level automation framework, pilot implementation, and status of the project, a list of DSA generators that have been prototyped by a group of faculty and students, representative screenshots of the machine-made slides produced by the generators, the first hand experience of coding the generators and using the computer-generated slides, a prototype of a cyber-based platform that adds the second level of automation to the system, the pedagogical advantages and the implementation challenges of the approach, as well as a comparative analysis between the proposed approach and other solutions, etc.