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Program Highlights
SMCM Putnam Rally 2010 Rally Video
Dave Kung giving the 2010 MAA Undergraduate Lecture in Mathematics at the San Francisco Joint Meetings. The talk, which features musical excerpts that illustrate mathematical ideas, drew a standing-room-only crowd of 400 people.
Student Spotlight
The two rows of mathematics graduates during the 2009 graduation ceremony.
Virtual St. Mary's
Team: Kevin Smith (Leader), Ryan Keeling, Michael Pullen, Jennifer Norris, Barbara Heigl, Martin McGuire, Charles Nichols, Jeremy Lyman, and Brian Lapato.
Creating geospecific 3-dimensional databases for real-time visual simulation
The original goal was to create a 3-d model of the entire campus. The model is comprised of a number of datasets including: raster imagery, elevation data, vector data, digital photographs, and 3-d models. All of the datasets are correlated to a geographic coordinate system so their placement is accurate in the real world. The database, once created, can be loaded into a runtime environment in which one can traverse the database in real-time. In other words a person can move to any point in the database and the view they would see is rendered instantaneously (60 times a second).
Once we had completed this phase of the project we decided to expand the database into Historic St. Mary's City and to create our own homegrown runtime environment for the database. Along with expanding the database, a number of enhancements are to be made including adding sound and moving models. The runtime will allow us to distribute the database to prospective students so they can take a "virtual tour" of the campus before they even arrive at St. Mary's. The addition of Historic St. Mary's City will be utilized as a presentation tool in the proposed museum at the St. John's Site.
A detailed description of Kevin's SMP (in PDF format) is available here.
To view short clips of the project in AVI format, click here.
Other "Virtual" SMPs (see here for a list of all Math&CS SMPs) included Jeremy Lyman's web-interactive tours of dorms, Matthew Dumas' web-interactive tour of the new boathouse, and Charles Nichols' tour of Historic Saint Mary's City, and Brian Lapato's tour of Historic Saint John's Site.
