My first published article

I (and my coauthors) have now had a paper published in an academic journal, the Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Mathematics Journal. This is a paper we wrote during SMALL. Here is the journal, with ours the first article listed.

Isoperimetric Regions in Gauss Sectors

We consider the free boundary isoperimetric problem in sectors of the Gauss plane. The solution is not always a circular arc as in sectors of the Euclidean plane. We prove that the solution is sometimes a ray and we conjecture that the solution is sometimes a "rounded n-gon" which we discovered computationally using Mathematica.

There is also another paper that should be published sometime soon in a different journal.

My first 10k

I ran my first 10k race on Saturday, on the track at Union. My teammate and I wanted to be sure to run under 44:00 to qualify for Div IIIs, so we ran the first four miles at just under 7:00/mile pace (43:30 would be the total time). We traded off leading each mile. For the fifth and sixth miles I sped up a lot, despite my right foot falling asleep and then going completely numb. This took almost a minute off of our conservative time plan, and I finished in 42:35.

Union reports:

Williams College swept the men’s and women’s 10000m run, with Ryan Ford (Middlefield, CT) winning the men’s side with a time of 35:45.79 and Diana Davis (Deer Island, ME) taking the women’s side at 42:34.90.

I have no idea how they found my hometown, or why they would have changed it from Isle to Island. Anyway, the last time I won a race was in senior year of high school in winter track, so that's nice.

Full results:

Mixed 10000 Meter Run
=========================================================================
    Name                    Year School                  Seed     Finals 
=========================================================================
  1 Ford, Ryan                SO Williams            35:25.00   35:45.79  
  2 Davis, Diana              SR Williams            42:00.00   42:34.90  
  3 Katzelnick, Leah          FR Williams            42:00.00   43:01.30  
  4 Plasse, Erin              SO Union               43:45.00   43:09.92 

Qualifying for Div IIIs means that I will run the 10k again this coming weekend, hopefully going under 42:30 and possibly even 42:00 depending on if the weather cooperates.