Here are some papers and presentations I had fun working on during my undergraduate degree at Carleton. Usually this is due to some cool LaTeX I got to write (source is attached when this is the case), but the topics are also pretty interesting to me (and perhaps you).
This was my mathematics senior thesis, which I completed with the amazing team of Eva Airoldi, Tom Patterson, Antonia Ritter, and Rebekah Stein under the advisement of Deanna Haunsperger. We studied existing techniques which attempt to quantify gerrymandering and then built some software which can detect when a proposed redistricting plan is an outlier among the set of all legal plans using a technique known as ensemble analysis. In short, we generate a random sample of millions of legal redistricting plans using a Markov Chain, compute various bias metrics on each plan, and then compare the metrics of propsed plans to the distribution for each metric across the ensemble. The more of an outlier a plan is compared to the ensemble, the more likely one can assume it is that that plan was politically gerrymandered.
We each had different skills, interests, and backgrounds going into this project, and we complemented each other wonderfully to create a very effective collaboration. We all really enjoyed working together, and we received distinction on this project from the Carleton College Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
Links: Paper Presentation LaTeX
This was the final paper for my Combinatorial Theory course with the great Mark Krusemeyer. I wrote a bunch of LaTeX commands to more easily construct unusually shaped chessboards. Risa Fines did much of the other thinking. It was good fun.
This was the final paper for my Abstract Algebra course with Eric Egge. Evan David and I toiled long into the night in the basement of Willis Hall to crank this out.
Linguistics is a lot like the computer science of natural languages (and no, I don't mean NLP). This was the end of my first venture into linguistics, and the goal of the class over the course of the term was to develop syntactic "rules" to describe the English language. As a result, I spent too much of this class poking holes in the class's rules by coming up with edge cases we weren't supposed to worry about. Needless to say, I had a lot of fun, which I think comes through in this presentation in particular.
Links: Paper Presentation (no LaTeX here unfortunately, this predates my discovery of it)
The "analysis" in this paper might not hold up to much scrutiny, but the syntax trees are beautiful.