Mentoring Undergraduate Research
In Fall 2001 and Spring 2002 I mentored Derek Sperry and David Wood in some projects involving the LPA Tribolium 2-species competition model.
In Fall 1998, my calculus student Iris Oved studied the following question: How do handheld calculators compute the values of functions such as sin(x)? An early method (about 300 years old) uses Taylor series; a better method (about 150 years old) uses Minimax polynomials; but one of the best methods (under 50 years old) turns out to be an iterative algorithm called CORDIC.
Even though the class was over, Iris continued working on this project in Spring 1999. Below is a copy of her most recent writeup. You may reach her via email at iriso@u.arizona.edu.
Computing Transcendental Functions (April 1999) by Iris Oved: