Four Morningside College graduates recently had a paper published in the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology Undergraduate Math Journal that they wrote while students at Morningside.

Four Morningside College graduates recently had a paper published in the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology Undergraduate Math Journal that they wrote while students at Morningside.

They worked on the paper, “Cops and Robbers on Oriented Graphs,” with Chris Spicer, associate professor of mathematics at Morningside College.

Cops and Robbers is a turn-based game traditionally played on graphs. Similar to the classic children’s game, one cop and one robber move along edges in a graph with the cop trying to catch the robber and the robber trying to evade capture. In the article, they extended the game to oriented graphs.

The recent graduates who wrote the paper are Elise Darlington, Claire Gibbons, Kelly Guy and Jon Hauswald.

Darlington and Hauswald are now high school math teachers. Gibbons is pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics from Oregon State University with an emphasis in undergraduate mathematics education. Guy works for the Siouxland Community Health Center as a quality and data analyst for the HIV Center.

Spicer joined the faculty at Morningside College in 2009. He received faculty excellence awards from the college in 2011 and 2014. He has a Ph.D. in mathematics from North Dakota State University.