Lycoming College Student Thomas Osborne research published in physics journal

2017 Oct 6

Lycoming College physics majors Brianna Zawadzki '18 and Tom Osborne '18, and Christopher Kulp, Ph.D., professor of physics and chair of the department of astronomy and physics at Lycoming College, co-authored a paper published in prominent academic journal The Physical Review E, in August. Their paper, "Using missing ordinal patterns to detect nonlinearity in time series data," explains a new way to determine the type of equations, linear or nonlinear, needed to model a system by analyzing data measured from the system. Understanding the type of equations that govern a system's behavior is an important first step in building predictive mathematical models of that system.While the paper looked specifically at data measured from a laser, sunspot data and electroencephalogram data, the technique can work on a wide variety of different types of systems from fields as diverse as physics, biology, engineering and even finance.