Alumnus Luke Akridge Presents at International Bridges Conference

Luke Akridge, an Honors College student and Gatton Academy alumnus from Woodford County, attended and gave a presentation at the 2009 Bridges Conference in Banff, Alberta, Canada, July 26 – 30, 2009.

His presentation, “Using Works of Visual Art to Teach Matrix Transformations,” with Rachel Bowman, Peter Hamburger, and Bruce Kessler, centered on  a project he and Bowman began in Dr. Hamburger’s Linear Algebra class in the Fall 2008 semester.  The exploration uses Mathematica code written by Dr. Kessler to explore the effects of different types of matrix transformations on points in the plane by applying the transformations to commonly-recognizable works of art.

Luke was the only undergraduate student to present at the conference.

The refereed paper of this work was published in the conference proceedings. A preprint of the paper can be downloaded at works.bepress.com/bruce_kessler/9/.

Luke’s travel was supported by the Honors College, Ogden College of Science & Engineering, and the Department of Mathematics.