Faculty research to be published in Mexican Math. Society journal

Dr. Michael Kelly is currently working on research in the area of topology known as Fixed Point Theory.  A collaboration with Professor D. Goncalves of the University of Sao Paulo, Brasil has lead to a research article which will appear in the journal Bulletin of the Mexican Math. Society.   This collaboration is ongoing and also involves a research project which is related to the graphic on the left. 

Professor and Student Collaborate on Mathematics Investigation

Professor Thibodeaux and senior student Savannah Logan '14, worked on a project to investigate relationships between derivatives and algebraic structures called zero divisors. They first derived a formula for the number of zero divisors in the set of upper triangular matrices whose entries are from some subset of the whole numbers. They then determined the rate at which this number grows as a function of the size of the matrices and the size of the subset of whole numbers. Those rates were then compared with the derivatives of those functions, as is done with marginal cost and revenue in economics. Finally, using Gronwall’s inequality, a result was presented concerning when it is appropriate to use derivatives to approximate these discrete quantities.

The Intentional Troubadour: Woody Guthrie's Travels Through the Twentieth Century

Woody Guthrie bore witness to most of the significant historical changes of the twentieth century. Born in 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma, he entered a world where most people got around on foot or on horseback. His parents, Charley and Nora Belle, however, brought the first automobile to the tiny western town launching Guthrie along the way to becoming, like most Americans of the century, a fully mobile human being. By the end of his life Guthrie had travelled on just about every type of conveyance available from the horse and buggy to the airplane. Through his art, his songwriting, poetry, narrative prose, fiction, drawings, and paintings, Guthrie chronicled this history in some of the most memorable imagery in the history of American art. What child raised in the United States hasn't sung those memorable words about the "redwood forests" and the "gulfstream waters" in school or camp? Guthrie's approach to his art is best described in his own motto "All you can write is what you see." And he saw everything. As a young man in the 1930s, Guthrie, like many residents of the Great Dustbowl, pulled up stakes and travelled around the country like any good hobo searching for opportunities and honing his songwriting and musical skills. He walked, hitch hiked, and hopped trains weaving his way through the highways and byways of a rapidly changing country. When World War II broke out he shipped out with the Merchant Marine for several tours crossing the Atlantic in an adventure that brought him to the beachheads of Africa, Italy, France, and the British Isles. He was drafted in 1945 and served the final months of the war in the United States Army Air  Corps, the precursor to the United States Air Force. His wanderings allowed him to visit all of the lower forty-eight, Europe, and Africa. And he wrote about what he saw. Guthrie's collection at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma alone contains over ten thousand manuscript pages of his writing including drafts of plays, novels, works of art, and the lyrics to over three thousand songs. I am mining this and other archival sources to write a history of the United States through the latter twentieth century using Guthrie's lens to look out on the people, places, political, historical, and technological changes that he witnessed firsthand and chronicled in his art. My research also includes interdisciplinary analyses of his art, and the how the themes of movement, motion, and travel infused his work and made it one of the best historical representations of twentieth-century America. From his writings about
hobos, Dustbowl refugees, workers, unions, and the vast vistas "From California to the New York Island" Guthrie's songs, poems, novels, opinion columns, drawings, and paintings depict an America (indeed a world) in transition.  Generous support from the College of Humanities and Natural Sciences, Loyola's Marquette Fellowship, and the Woody Guthrie/BMI Foundation Fellowship has allowed me to begin this painstaking research. Support from the Loyola University Collaborative Scholarship Fellowship, a joint effort between the College and the University Honors Program has allowed me to invite students to collaborate with me own my project and,
in one instance, develop their own. Continued support from the O'Keefe Professorship will allow that work to continue.

MRGO-ing, Going, Gone

Documentary film, MRGO-ING, GOING, GONE, a decade in the making, reveals the backstory of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet—the infamous and now closed 76-mile shipping channel implicated in the catastrophic flooding following Hurricane Katrina. Produced by the Loyola University New Orleans Center for Environmental Communication and e/Prime Media, it’s a story of wetlands destruction, coastal erosion, flooding, political wrangling and mismanaged public resources. A free, public screening of the documentary was held on Wednesday, Oct. 23 at 7 p.m. at the Chalmette Cinema located at 8700 W. Judge Perez Dr. The documentary premiered on New Orleans public television station WYES on October 20 and has since aired several times.

Filmmakers Bob Thomas, Ph.D., director of the Loyola Center for Environmental Communication, and Kevin McCaffrey, executive producer of e/Prime Media, interviewed more than 30 experts, including many who witnessed some of the most distressing environmental consequences of the shipping channel in St. Bernard Parish. The film also features The Lens reporter and Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist Bob Marshall. Though the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet was closed in 2009, the nation could potentially spend billions of dollars repairing the damage caused by it, according to experts interviewed in the documentary.