undergraduate advising
During summer 2021, Marissa Loving and I organized the 6-week virtual REU Braids, Surfaces, and Low-Dimensional Phenomena. You can see our arXiv preprint here!
Here is our community agreement from the REU.
We advised:
Dane Gollero (University of Utah '21; current: PhD student at Wisconsin-Madison with an NSF GRFP.)
Viridiana Neri (Columbia University '23)
Izah Tahir (Georgia Tech '22)
Len White (Cal Poly Pomona '21; current: PhD student at Portland State)
We were supported by NSF grants DMS-1552285 (SK, ML), DMS-1745583 (DG, SK, VN, IT, LW), and DMS-1902729 (ML).
This is a photo/Zoom screenshot from our last day together!
During the summer, we explored 1-bridge braids (an interesting and important class of positive braid knots) and their quantitative properties. This project explicitly determined the braid index of these knots in terms of their defining parameters. Below, you will find a video recording of their (fantastic!) final presentation from the summer, as well as the slides from the presentation (it includes motivation for the project, some beautiful pictures, and an amazing animation!).
Here is their poster presentation from the 2022 (virtual) JMM:
![](https://www.google.com/images/icons/product/drive-32.png)