The Lousiana Tech University B.S. degree program in Mathematics starts with an integrated freshman and sophomore curriculum in which students are exposed to mathematics and its connections to the sciences. This exposure can help decide upon a minor in the sciences, but minors are not limited to the sciences. Recent minors of mathematics graduates include Aviation, Biology, Business Administration, Computer Science, English, Finance, Physics, and Spanish to name a few. For students interested in engineering, we offer an engineering concentration instead of a minor, and for students who want to focus solely on mathematics, we offer a concentration in mathematics and statistics. In fact, because mathematics is so closely related to engineering and the sciences, it is not uncommon for our majors to, along with the mathematics degree, earn a degree in one of these fields.
The final two years of the B. S. degree program are devoted to advanced classes in mathematics and to finishing the minor or concentration. The flexibility of mathematics is again reflected in the curriculum, which, aside from fundamental classes in Linear Algebra, Logic and Set Theory, Abstract Algebra, and Analysis, consists entirely of electives. In this fashion students can tailor their curriculum to their interests. Electives include analysis, numerical analysis, partial differential equations, linear algebra, control theory, graph theory, number theory, and statistical models. Faculty are ready to advise which subjects would be most useful to the student's intended career path.
The M.S. degree program provides intensive studies in foundational areas such as analysis, algebra, and probability theory, as well as in applied areas such as statistics, numerical analysis, control theory, partial differential equations, and graph theory. It also allows students to pursue interdisciplinary studies with courses taken from disciplines such as Computer Science, Physics, Engineering, Economics, and Finance. Students in the M.S. program often continue in the C.A.M. program, an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Computational Analysis and Modeling.
This movie presents the simulated two-dimensional streamwise fluid contour lines inside a peristaltic micropump created by Professor David Marr’s research group which was published in Science, V. 296, p11841, in 2002. The size of this pump is a channel of dimensions 24μm×4μm×6μm with six colloidal spheres of diameter 2.9μm embedded inside this channel. Microspheres are manipulated by optical trapping using laser beams to create a synchronized traveling wave motion with a period of 0.5 second. This peristaltic wave from the right to the left creates a net flow rate of 60μm3/s. In the simulation, the Force Coupling Method was used to model the interactions between spheres and the fluid. Modified Navier-Stokes equations are solved in terms of primitive variables, velocity and pressure, using modal spectral element method. Corresponding direction numerical simulations at a stationary sphere configuration were performed to numerically verify the results with different number of unstructured elements and orders of polynomial expansion. This simulation was published in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering (JMM), V. 14, p567, in 2004. This paper was downloaded 100 times in 18 days from the date of publication and ranked top 10% most accessed papers across all journals of Institute of Physics Publishing, England, according to a letter by Natasha Leeper, publisher, JMM, February 7, 2005.
