Welcome
I am Ben Riley, a fourth year math Ph. D student at the University of Michigan. My advisor is Igor Kriz. I completed my B.S. in Mathematics at the University of Kentucky.
Previous Research
- I worked in the UK Math Lab Tropical geometry group, lead by Chris Manon. Our group studied properties of well-poised hypersurfaces. Our paper classifying these hypersurfaces will be printed in Communications in Algebra, and a preprint can be found here on the ArXiv.
- I completed my Honor's Thesis at UK under Bert Guillou. We studied the nilpotence of elements in the Steenrod Algebra, and a revised version of the thesis will be available shortly.
- I participated in the summer Math REU program at Indiana Univeristy in 2018. I worked with Carmen Rovi to explore equivariant Cut-Paste invariants and their connections with cobordism. A writeup will be available shortly.
- Before math research, I worked on several physics projects, including two summer interships at NIST. I worked with Heather Chen-Meyer on CT and neutron imaging standards. A conference paper detailing the neutron imaging work can be found here.
Teaching
At Michigan
I have been the graduate student instructor for the following classes:
- Math 116 Calculus 2 - Winter '20, '21, Fall '21.
- Math 115 Calculus 1 - Fall '19, '20
I was the graduate student co-coordinator for Calculus 2 during the Winter '22 semester.
At Kentucky
I was an undergraduate assistant for the following classes:
- Math 111 Intro to Contemporary Math - Fall '16, Winter '17
- Math 108 College Algebra - Winter '16, Fall '18
I was the grader for the following courses as an Eaves undergraduate assistant:
- Math 322, Matrix Algebra and its Applications - Fall '17
- Math 261, Introduction to Number Theory- Winter '18
Other Activities
For the 2021-2022 academic year, I was a member of the MREG organizing committee. More information on the 2022 program can be found here.
Max Lahn, Lukas Scheiwiller, Ethan Zell, and I compiled the following solutions for the UMich topology QR. They are provided as is.