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Eight Marshall University mathematics students will be on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., April 24-25 to display their work on the Marshall Differential Analyzer, a machine designed to solve a mathematical equation known as a differential equation.
The students will be taking part in the annual Undergraduate Research Posters on the Hill event, which is sponsored by the Council on Undergraduate Research.
The students are among 11 who make up the Marshall Differential Analyzer Team. The eight will visit offices of senators and congressmen from West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky on the afternoon of April 25 and will present their research work at a poster session that evening in the U.S. Capitol. The team’s abstract was one of only 60 selected nationally.
The students who are going to Washington, all mathematics majors, are: team leader Richard Merritt (senior, Huntington); William Morrison (graduate student, South Point, Ohio); Stacy Scudder (graduate student, Pikeville, Ky.); John Fishman (senior, Clearwater, Fla.); Saeed Keshavarzian (senior, Huntington); Tom Cuchta (freshman, Moundsville, W.Va.); Lin Yuan (graduate student, Fu Xin, Lial Ning, China); and Tue Ly (graduate student, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam).
Other student team members are Daniel Velazquez (junior, Guanajuato, Mexico), Caleb Sotak (senior, Beckley, W.Va.), and Keshav Pokhrel (graduate student, Magaragadi, Bardiya, Nepal). Dr. Bonita Lawrence, associate professor of mathematics, is the team’s supervisor and Dr. Clayton Brooks, also an associate professor of mathematics, is a team member.
Lawrence said Marshall’s Differential Analyzer Team began to take shape in 2004 after she spotted a static display of a portion of the Manchester Differential Analyzer machine at the London Science Museum. The machine she observed in the museum was built in the 1930s.
The Marshall Differential Analyzer Team since has built a small prototype model of this historic machine, and soon will begin work on a much larger version, Lawrence said.
“The goal of the project is to build a four-integrator model that can be used by mathematics teachers in the area – or whoever wants to come to visit us – to teach students about relationships between functions that describe, for example, position of a moving particle and its speed,” Lawrence said. “My dream is to bring teachers in and train them to use the machine and then let them bring in their classes and let the students run problems of their own on it.”
With the educational merit of the machine in mind, the Marshall team set out to build the model from parts similar to the Meccano parts – the British version of Erector Set – that Dr. Arthur Porter used more than 70 years ago in building the machine in England. The first differential analyzer was built by Dr. Vannevar Bush at M.I.T. in the early 1930s. After visiting M.I.T. in the mid 1930s, Dr. Douglas Hartree of Manchester University returned to England and suggested to Porter, then an undergraduate physics student, that a similar machine be built out of Meccano parts.
Porter, who is 96 years old, serves as the senior mentor and inspiration for the Marshall Differential Analyzer Team from his home in Advance, N.C. Tim Robinson, an electronics engineer originally from England and now living near San Francisco, is another important technical advisor and mentor, Lawrence said.
Robinson has a full-scale model of Porter’s machine in his home. It is the only working differential analyzer in the country. The Marshall team’s prototype model is the only publicly accessible differential analyzer in the United States, according to Lawrence. She said more than 500 people have observed the model in action.
“The Differential Analyzer can be used to construct beautiful curves from information about the way the curve changes, or its derivative,” Lawrence said. “It offers a physical interpretation of a mathematics equation and solves the equation for your viewing pleasure. You can watch the solution take shape and acquire an understanding of how it is constructed by watching and listening to the machine.”
While other methods for finding numerical solutions of differential equations have been developed over the years, the physical interpretation of a mathematical expression that the Differential Analyzer offers has never been matched, Lawrence said.
“When the machine is completed, it will certainly have the capacity to solve many complex differential equations, but the contribution it will make to mathematics learning is its greatest asset,” she said.
Lawrence said the ultimate goal of the project is to offer a multifaceted perspective of a mathematical expression that includes visual, tactile and aural aspects.
For more information on the Marshall Differential Analyzer Team and its visit to Washington, D.C., call Lawrence at (304) 696-3040.
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