Matt Elder
Matt Elder, one of the best majors we have ever had at the university, is having a great time at the University of Wisconsin where he is in his second semester of graduate studies in computer science. He is on a Department of Defense fellowship (valued at nearly $95,000). Matt was also the recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and he received a Goldwater Fellowship in 2004. He’s a member of Phi Beta Kappa and won the Thomas B. Pearce Carolina Scholar Award.
Matt was a double major here in Mathematics and Computer Science. As a freshman at the university, he set a departmental record when he placed 92nd in the nation on the William Lowell Putnam Exam. The department placed 63rd in the nation one year thanks Amtth and the additional support from Eric Mueller and Jonathan Mason each placing the top 500.
I served as Matt’s honors senior thesis advisor, but he did his project entirely on his own, and I did nothing more than read it and handle the details of setting up his defense. He has since published that material Path Bundles on n-Cubes in the journal of Discrete Mathematics vol. 308. 2008. This is a most complex senior thesis!
In spite of all this, Matt finds the time to engage in numerous other activities. In particular, he’s into strategy games (some of which he invented) as well as Ultimate Frisbee. He plays the violin and has participated in a string quartet. And lately, in his free time at Wisconsin, he’s taken up some random programming projects, gotten into juggling, and is getting more serious about the game of Go.
You can visit Matt’s WEB site.