This award supports the research of Professor M. Cordero- Vourtsanis to work in combinatorics. She intends to study a class of finite affine planes coordinatized by nonassociative algebras. She intends to classify finite translation planes of rank 3 and odd dimension over their kernel, those with specialized orbits in the line at infinity, and a class that admits a p-primitive Baer collineation. This research is in the general area of combinatorics. Combinatorics attempts to find efficient methods to study how discrete collections of objects can be organized. And, so it is extremely important to modern communications, for example the design of large networks as in telephone systems and the design of algorithms in computer science.
