The summer is over and it’s time to report on some of the events. In the beginning of summer I made page for 3 potential NSF REU projects. These are the two that I ended up supervising:

• The Topology of Data by Joseph Snyder, and
• 3D Image Analysis by James Molchanoff

The topic of the REU was computational science so the general goal was to do something new computationally while learning some math. So, we used and modified some existing software. The main idea of the first project is to use jPlex to compute dimensions of datasets while the main idea of the second was to use CHomP to compute the homology classes of 3D images along with their persistence. Ironically, jPlex computes persistent homology but lacks relative homology which had to be implemented. On the other hand, CHomP has relative homology but the persistence had to be implemented. These issues were mostly resolved. Unfortunately, in either case there wasn’t enough time to test the programs with real-life data.

To be continued…