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Houghton Professor’s Collaborative Piece Accepted for Publication

November 11, 2021

Jill Jordan, Professor of Mathematics and STEM Director, has collaborated with colleagues Rene Ardila, Christine Caples, Helen G. Grundman, Laura L. Hall-Selig, Karen T. Kohl, and Thomas P. Wakefield to create a piece entitled “Values of Weighted Davenport Constants.” This piece has been accepted for publication in Vol. 21 of Integers Journal, a refereed scholarly journal that publishes papers in the area of combinatorial number theory. The paper focuses on a problem related to zero-sum sequences, which has been studied for over 50 years. Together, Jordan’s research group was able to make progress on calculating a number called the Weighted Davenport Constant for certain types of groups of numbers.

This research group first came together during a Research Experiences for Undergraduate Faculty (REUF) workshop hosted by The Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM) at Brown University in the summer of 2019. This workshop was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Jordan’s work in this area was the basis for an undergraduate mathematics research project during the Spring 2021 semester. During this research project, three Houghton students (Micah McClatchey ’21, Elise Pereira ’21, and Allison Morgan ’23) worked alongside Jordan to investigate several problems related to zero sum sequences in finite abelian groups.