Jake Hernandez grew up in Houston, Texas where his frequent visits to the Museum of Fine Arts introduced him to the works of Mark Rothko and Piet Mondrian. Inspired by these artist’s use of color, Hernandez has leveraged his own understanding of color theory and mathematics to explore the complexity of this element for his honors thesis. In Colored Squares I and II, Hernandez created a process of random color generation from a set of blue, red, and yellow pigments to explore color in the absence of human bias. Since artists' personal biases and inclinations towards color affect our exploration of this element, Hernandez wanted to eliminate these obstructions to investigate color to a much greater extent. In Colored Landscapes I, II, and III, Hernandez used the primaries again in a more expressive style. Drawing inspiration from his travels across Europe and North America, Hernandez created new landscapes all his own. These studies offer a substantiated argument for the limits of art itself, showing artists have only explored a very small fraction of art's possibilities and that more exploration can be done in color and the other elements of art.

Metal oxides are crucial materials that can be applied to sustainable processes for heat storage or oxygen pumping. In order to be able to apply metal oxides to industrial processes, an effective model of the metal oxide’s reduction thermodynamics is required. To do this, Wilson et al., (2023) developed a compound energy formulism (CEF) algorithm to form these models. The algorithm in its current form can effectively form model thermodynamics; however, the data set required for this model is extensive and large, leading to high costs of modeling a metal oxide. Furthermore, the algorithm faces further difficulties with uneven data densities within the set, leading to poorer fits for low density data. To assist in alleviating the cost associated with data collection, data-omitting strategies were performed to find unimportant points, or points that formed models that had good fits to the original model when removed. After conducting these tests, many points and trends were found to be crucial to keep within the data set, but due to uneven data density, no definitive conclusions could be made on how to reduce the algorithm’s data set. The tests gave evidence that points in high data density regions could be removed from the data set due to only the fact that there existed nearby points to provide essential information to closely interpolate/extrapolate the missing data. Although this project currently did not meet the goal of reducing the data set, preliminary findings of what points could be non-crucial to the data set were identified. Future testing with the proposed weighting methods will be conducted to determine what data can be safely removed from the set to form models that properly reflect the metal oxide’s properties.

Color, shape, and motion perception are easily identifiable in the center of the visual field. However, less is understood about the recognition of change in color and shape when motion occurs in the parafoveal region of the eye. This study seeks to gain more knowledge on this subject and help guide future research. Major goals of this research included to find if there is significant difference between change and no change of shape and color in the peripheral vision and to seek a better understanding of this perception. A total of 47 undergraduate psychology students participated. Subjects were shown videos of a shape moving across the screen that either had a shape change, color change, or no change occur. Participants were then asked to report if they saw a change or no change. We found that students noticed that change at a rate significantly greater than average. These findings suggest perception of shape and color change may be present in the parafoveal region of the visual field.