The Best Writing in Mathematics featuring work by Ben Logsdon '20, and Anya Michaelsen '19, and Prof. Ralph Morrison

Our congratulations go out to Professor Ralph Morrison, Ben Logsdon ’20, and Anya Michaelsen ’19 for their work “Nullstellenfont” (Math Horizons, 27:4, 5-7 (2020)) which has been selected for inclusion in the 2021 edition of The Best Writing in Mathematics!

This paper was adapted from a final project by Ben and Anya for Professor Morrison’s Math 487: Computational Algebraic Geometry class in Spring 2019.  Using properties of solution sets to polynomial equations, Ben and Anya built a tool to make a polynomial equation f(x,y)=0 whose solution set looks like any string of text you would like!  You can try it out yourself here.