Hello! I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Vassar College. My research interests are in topological data analysis (TDA), computational topology and geometry, and mathematical biology. In addition to research and teaching, I also care about making the scientific community more welcoming and accessible. I contribute to various projects that focus on this.

Links: CV. google scholar. linkedin.

Email: rbelton@vassar.edu Pronouns: she/her

News

  • December 2024. I am giving a talk at the Joint Meeting of NZMS, AustMS, and AMS in the special session on Applied and Computational Topology.
  • October 2024. Enrique Alvarado, Sarah Percival, and I are organizing a minisymposium at the SIAM Conference on Mathematics of Data Science. We have a fantastic line up of presenters on topological data visualization.
  • October 2024. I am on the organizing committee of the Broader Engagement (BE) Program for the SIAM Conference on Mathematics of Data Science. Through the BE program, Elizabeth Munch and I will be mentoring a Guided Affinity Group (GAG) on “Topology and Data”. Students in our GAG will meet with us each morning and attend sessions relevant to our topic.
  • September 2024. I am a mentor for Projects in TDA. In this program, students from different universities collaborate together on open problems in TDA.
  • September 2024. This fall I am teaching two sections of M 240: Introduction to Statistics at Vassar.
  • August 2024. New preprint! In Any Graph is a Mapper Graph, we investigate the inverse problem for the popular Mapper algorithm: Given a dataset and graph, does there exist a set of Mapper parameters such that the output Mapper graph of the dataset is isomorphic to the graph? We provide two constructions that affirmatively answer this question. We also show how these constructions generalize to simplicial complexes. Lastly, we show how the lens function can be viewed as continuous, and can be extended to a Lipschitz or m-times differentiably continuous function when the dataset is a subset of Euclidean space.
  • August 2024. I am attending the Joint Statistical Meetings and participating in the Preparing to Teach workshop.
  • June 2024. I am attending Computational Geometry (CG) Week and am giving a talk at the Young Researchers Forum.