Bakersfield College Math Students

At the 2003 MAA Southern California Spring Meeting

 Three Bakersfield College Math Students presented poster sessions at the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) Southern California Spring Meeting at Harvey Mudd College on March 8, 2003.  Bakersfield College accounted for three of the 40 poster projects and was the only community college that had students participate in the session.  Other participants were from CSU’s, UC’s, and four-year private colleges.

Traffic Flow on Freeways Derek Brown Traffic flow on freeways has always interested me and I got the idea of modeling traffic flow mathematically. I found data from traffic counts on a freeway in Vermont and I am going to use mathematical models to show changes in traffic flow over time.  The models I am using take into account such variables as time, flux, density of cars, and interval of freeway covered.

Cryptography            Mark Handy

Years ago, success in business, science, academia and wealth depended largely upon how much information you had.  Well, you guessed it; it’s still the same situation today.  But it is different in the world of today compared to the world of yesterday.  We have the Internet, intranets, broadband digital service breaking speeds that up until five years ago experts thought would be impossible.  The convenience of high-speed communication comes as two-edged sword.  It comes with high-speed sharing of information on one side and high-speed information theft on the other.  Therefore, encryption and decryption must take place in order to protect the information that is shared, and ensure that it is shared only among those intended.  The study of mathematical coding and decoding is called cryptography.  I have focused my study in two main areas:  One, RSA encryption, which uses large numbers and modular arithmetic as its primary operations and is similar to the way secure servers in any network might protect information; and two, encryption by simple invertible matrices.  Both have their unique advantages and disadvantages that are explained.

For additional information contact the faculty advisor, Becky Head, at 395-4050 or rhead@bc.cc.ca.us.

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