Below  is an example of a Topic and Mentor Preference submitted by Eric Jaimes (Oxy '97) and adapted by Prof. McDonald last year.

Eric Jaimes
Push-Button Locks and Generating Functions

I am interested in applied problems in the area of combinatorics. In particular, I have been discussing with Professor Jennifer Quinn the idea of looking at combinatorial problems associated with push-button locks. To begin with, I would look at how to count the number of possible combinations there are for a simple push-button lock, say with three buttons. Professor Quinn has given me papers by A. Benjamin and D. Velleman & G. Call which deal with the more general problem of n push-button locks. To understand these papers, I need to learn about generating functions which are used to help find the solution to the n push-button lock problem.

I would like to work with Professor Jennifer Quinn since we have already been discussing this problem in some depth.

If you are interested in learning LaTeX, you can examine the source code that was used to create Eric's submission, you can open this code as a LaTeX file or you can view the actual DVI output.

Last updated 30 May 2002