Faculty interested in undergraduate research
Will Dickinson
Contact information: [email protected]
Office: MAK A-2-108
Website: http://faculty.gvsu.edu/dickinsw/
Research areas: Discrete Geometry, Spherical and Hyperbolic Geometry
Current projects:
1) Spherical Easel: Do you have a strong programming background? Would you like to contribute to a modern web-based application that models spherical geometry? If so, then this might be the project for you! Spherical Easel is a web-based Vue application written in Typescript for researching, teaching, and learning spherical geometry. It allows users to dynamically explore the geometry of the sphere by drawing and controlling the behavior of spherical objects including points, lines, circles, and conics. Don't know what spherical lines or circles are? Come talk to me and we can discuss both the geometry and how you might contribute. There are over 50 tools planned for the program but only half have been implemented - perhaps you could implement one! You can see the latest public version of Spherical Easel at https://easelgeo.app/.
2) Spherical and Hyperbolic Geometry: In my heart, I believe that every result in Euclidean geometry has a clean, beautiful and analogous result in spherical and hyperbolic geometry. I enjoy playing in the trigonometric briar patch that results when you attempt to move Euclidean results into these other geometries. The Pythagorean Theorem has already been moved into these other geometries... or has it? That depends on your definition of a right triangle and I think that is up for grabs! Come ask me about the possibilities.
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