• What are the most effective training methods for athletes?
• How can we improve low income housing in our nation's cities?
• What are all the possible 5 ball juggling patterns?
• How can we create fair congressional voting districts?
• Are forest fires really intensifying?

With the influx of modern computing vast quantities of data are collected every second. Mathematicians, statisticians and data scientists work to extract knowledge and gain insight from this data. Often working as a part of an interdisciplinary team they tackle questions in diverse fields like marketing, genomics, education and neuroscience. In addition to analyzing data, they work to create models used for prediction and decision making. The CiSM certificate, in combination with a mathematics, actuarial science or statistics and data science major, is designed to provide students with a foundation to help tackle these problems.

The biggest regret I have from my undergraduate career is not taking more computational courses to support my mathematics degree. I was introduced to and relied heavily on R throughout graduate school. Currently, I use R to teach statistics as well as to perform my own statistical analyses for consultation projects. In the data-driven world we live in today, strong computational skills are a must for students seeking careers in math and science.Rebekah Musselwhite '06

Computation in Math and Statistics at UE

The University of Evansville's Mathematics Department has a long history of preparing students for careers working in mathematics or statistics. A guiding principle in all of our degrees is to provide a strong theoretical framework in traditional mathematics and build specializations from there.

Students in the Actuarial Science program will complete the Society of Actuaries (SOA) Validation by Educational Experience (VEE) requirements. All students in this program will complete at least one actuarial exam with most completing two or more. In the Applied Mathematics program, students will combine a rigorous background in foundational mathematics with an area of application where that uses mathematical tools to create sophisticated models. The newest addition to the Mathematics Department is the Statistics and Data Science program. In this program, students will work through a project driven curriculum and engage in the entire work cycle of predictive modeling; formulating problems, acquiring and cleaning data, modeling, interpreting and reporting. Students will master statistical software including R and BigQuery. All of the programs in the Mathematics Department work together and provide students with the opportunity to create a program that fits the needs of the student.

• All mathematics and data science majors take at least two programming courses.
• The courses in the statistics and data science program which are taken by students throughout the department. These courses help students learn to import, explore, visualize and transform data in R in order to create compelling arguments.
• In the mathematics senior seminar students will work with teams of other students to develop the mathematical models needed to study a problem in an area of application in the natural sciences, marketing or related fields.

In recent years, some of the projects that students have worked on include:

• Developing a model to estimate the prevalence of risky health behaviors amongst the Evansville population.
• Studying how emoticons can be used to predict sentiment.
• Creating a simplified HPA axis model for analyzing stress response.
• Exploring the relationship between different basketball drill types and game performance.
• Determining the likelihood of specific defects in particular crystal.