Math studies take Neshaminy graduate to faraway places
Education can show students a whole new world, but it literally can take Neshaminy graduate Ryan Matzke around the globe.
The Goldwater Scholar and senior at Gettysburg College has traveled to two other continents so far as part of his research into mathematics. Matzke has studied in Hungary in Europe and South Africa as part of exchange programs and research trips in the three years since he graduated high school.
Matzke also participated in an undergraduate research program at Auburn University last year and made a presentation on some of his research at the Mathematics Association of America conference in Portland, Oregon, this year.
“It has been a little bit exhausting here and there. But it is also just a fantastic experience that I have nothing to compare to,” he said.
The research he’s done differs a little from other science fields — there is not a laboratory or equipment — but they work on the same principles, he said.
“You wonder about how something works. In the other sciences, you’re working with physical objects, stuff that moves, stuff that can crash into each other,” he said. “But with math you are looking at the actual structure of math itself. You are looking at math, you’re looking at numbers graphs and more complicated structures.”
Matzke brings plenty of energy to explaining his research, too. He worked with a group of other undergraduates for the presentation at the Portland conference, on a scheduling method called Grundy numbers.
Basically, they took a method that slots an “event” as early as it can be accomplished. He said the method can work well on a small scale, but adding in more events and making it more complicated can make it very inefficient.
In their research, they tried to make the method as difficult as possible and as inefficient as possible, so that others could use that as a baseline to develop better methods to schedule events.
If that sounds complicated, Julie Matzke, Ryan’s mother, agrees with you. She said her son’s work passed her ability to understand and work with it when he was in high school and passed her husband’s when Ryan got to college. She works as a CPA and her husband is a physics teacher and former engineer.
“Math has been something he has been passionate about since he was young. It has been really fun and fulfilling to watch him grow,” she said.
She said she was glad he has been able to work with those opportunities and travel the world.
“He’s met a lot of great people out there he can connect with whose minds work in the same way his does,” she said. “I’m excited to see where it takes him next.”
This year, Matzke said he will focus on the work for his Goldwater Scholarship. Congress established the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship in 1986 to honor the former senator and presidential candidate. It is given every year to 300 sophomores and juniors nationwide for research in STEM fields.
Matzke said the work will involve finding the outer bounds of H L sum sets. He said that will involve finding the highest numbers that can be in a set of integers where, by adding them together in two different ways, none of the sums will be the same.
Matzke said he’s already looking forward to passing along knowledge and teaching the next generation.
“My main goal is to eventually become a professor,” he said. “I’ve had a few teaching assistant opportunities and I’ve loved it.”