Nathan Keough ’24: From magic squares to the Department of Defense, Maryville College double major makes the most of his opportunities
Dec. 18, 2023
Growing up in Maryville, the college down the road was the easy choice for Nathan Keough ’24, but other institutions tried to tempt him away.
However, the financial aid and the academic challenges offered at Maryville College won him over, a decision he hasn’t regretted. What he discovered at MC are opportunities for new experiences he likely wouldn’t have enjoyed at other schools … including an internship with the Department of Defense working in the Washington, D.C., metro area on projects such as software management, software development, mathematics research and high-performance computing.
Suffice it to say that the U.S. government recognized in Keough what the Scots Science Scholars program at MC did when they persuaded him to enroll here: a brilliant mind with an insight and understanding of mathematics that’s been challenged and engaged because of experiences at a small, private liberal arts college that have prepared him for anything by allowing him to study everything.
“The liberal arts perspective gave me a background in STEM, specifically in math and computer science, but it also gave me a background in a variety of other fields, and that’s put me ahead of people focused on one specific area,” he says. “For example, I can come in and do technical writing, but having that diverse experience, that background in writing and that ability to look at historical perspectives gives me an advantage, and I’m very grateful for that.”
An academic launchpad at MC
Since childhood, Keough was interested in science, and as he got older, he gravitated toward more technology-related scientific fields. Working with computers gave him a background in coding while he was in high school, and his interest in technology led him to the Division of Mathematics and Computer Science at Maryville College. There, he found he was eligible to take part in the Scots Science Scholars program, which provides financial aid and academic enrichment and support for select students interested in the STEM fields. One of those support structures is a two-week, all-expenses-paid, on-campus summer experience prior to the start of each student’s first year.
“That summer experience — coming to campus, getting a feel for what it looked like in a computer lab or a science lab, getting up to speed before the semester started — that momentum carried me on into the semester, and set me up to do good work,” he says. “I learned pretty quickly everything I needed to know for my Intro to Computer Science course, and that level of confidence was a major force in where I went from there.”
During his first year, MC Professor of Mathematics Dr. Maria Siopsis, Keough’s advisor, tapped his analytical mind to help solve a problem that required both his abilities in mathematics and computer science. Combining both to program a solution boosted his confidence even more and opened his eyes to the unique collaborations that MC could afford him.
“I don’t know if you could have gotten that anywhere else, especially as an undergrad and as a first-year student,” he says. “At bigger schools, it’s much more difficult to work that closely with a professor, especially on an actual project that’s very personal. And I love that, the opportunity to get to know and work with my professors personally.”
That was also the year he discovered the internship opportunity with the Department of Defense. Either during or shortly after his S3 summer experience, he says, he discovered a bulletin board in MC’s Sutton Science Center filled with fliers and information about various work-study and post-graduate opportunities, including one for the DoD.
“I kind of thought to myself, ‘There’s no way I can get that, but what if?’” he says. “So I applied and kind of forgot about it. Then, around October or November, I got a call to let me know I was selected, and that’s what started the whole process. It didn’t feel real at first, and I guess I got lucky.”
Practical application of knowledge
His peers and professors, however, will testify that luck had nothing to do with it. He started out in an office working on software management, and every rotation since has been with a different department.
“My next one had me writing applications for high-performance computers, which was very fun and very cool,” he said. “I learned a lot doing that, gearing code toward very specific hardware. And then last spring, I was in a research directorate, doing mathematics research, and that one was very interesting.”
A cooperative education program designed to provide hands-on experiences to undergraduate students in their selected fields of study, it gives the Mathematics and Computer Science double major a chance to work full-time during alternating semesters with full-time coursework. What that means is that during his internship semesters, he’s a full-time Department of Defense employee working 40 hours weekly for 12 weeks. Much of the work is highly technical, but the opportunities for post-graduate work are on the table, he adds.
“Typically, students who complete the program get a full-time offer, or they can choose to go into a different program, but I can also choose to resign or take an equivalent job,” he says. “I’m not really too sure what I want to do yet, so I’m leaving my options open, but I do like knowing that offer is there. I’m also considering looking at opportunities at ORNL (Oak Ridge National Laboratory). I haven’t really decided yet.”
Such an attitude may seem cavalier for a senior who will cross the graduation stage in May, but such confidence is born from the knowledge he’s acquired at Maryville College, he adds.
“I’m not worried about not finding a place,” he says. “If I had gone somewhere else to school, I don’t know that I would have been able to find a program more challenging, and I certainly wouldn’t have this level of experience or breadth of knowledge.”
Besides, he still has work on the MC campus to do when he returns for the spring semester — specifically, wrapping up a Senior Study based on a computer lab exercise he enjoyed during his S3 summer experience. At Maryville College, the Senior Study is a distinctive feature of each student’s education in which degree candidates complete a project in their respective fields of study under the guidance of a faculty supervisor — in Keough’s case, Dr. Barbara Johnson, assistant professor of math and computer sciences.
“We learned about magic squares, which is a math puzzle kind of like Sudoku where you arrange the numbers 1 through 9 in a 3×3 grid. The idea is to try to arrange all the numbers in rows and columns and diagonals so that they all add up to the same number,” he says. “It’s a fun little puzzle with a lot of different variations, and people like to try to make them a lot bigger, like with a 4×4 or a 5×5 grid.
“The really interesting thing about that problem is that for each of those, we know how many solutions are possible, and the number of solutions grows really fast. For a 4×4 grid, there are 880 possible solutions. For a 5×5, there are over 275 million solutions. Yet nobody’s sure how many there are for a 6×6.”
And that’s where Keough’s Senior Study comes in. His challenge: To determine how fast he can actually compute such solutions on a computer with original code he’s written. It pushes him to draw on his academic knowledge in order to expand his coding skillset and apply it to the problem at hand. It’s another example of the way that Maryville College attracts, promotes and works with students whose innate ambition can be harnessed and amplified, Siopsis says.
“Nathan has a natural curiosity for computer science, so he spent a lot of time working on projects on his own, both for the College and for himself,” she adds. “There were at least two instances where I just mentioned some projects I wanted done, and before I knew it, Nathan was working on them and bringing us workable solutions. It’s really amazing to have a student who relishes a challenge and engages outside of the classroom the way Nathan does. Those are the kind of qualities that potential employers are really looking for and get excited about.”
The power of problem-solving
And, it’s important to note, he’s having fun along the way. Roughly a year ago, he says, he began working on a large code base, and he used that as a springboard to come up with creative computations that impressed his Senior Study advisor.
“Nathan had already written software to generate magic squares of order 4 in the programming language Rust, but as the order of the square increases, the computation time becomes prohibitively large. Nathan wanted to explore new algorithmic techniques,” Johnson says. “He began to see potential applications of mathematical group theory to magic square generation. As far as we were able to determine, no researcher had explored this avenue before.
“Eventually he was able to prove that, using group theory operations, a very small specific set of 50 magic squares of order 4 was sufficient to generate the entire 880 unique order 4 solutions. With his method, he was able to reduce the time to generate this set from approximately 20 hours to 1 second.”
In addition, Johnson adds, his work was supported by the Funding to Improve Post-Secondary Education Community Fund grant money from the Department of Education, a total of $645,000 awarded to the S3 program earlier this year. Such grant funding, she notes, is also entirely independent of his internship with the Department of Defense.
“This grant made it possible for both Nathan and me to have the amount of time we needed to work together,” Johnson adds. “ It was a privilege for me to work with such an intelligent, motivated, and creative researcher as Nathan, and I am excited to see the work he does going forward!”
Keough recently completed the written report of his study, and when he returns to Maryville College for the final on-campus semester of his undergraduate career, he’ll work on a presentation of his findings and toward publishing it. Combining pure mathematics — the study of mathematical concepts independently of any application outside of mathematics — with a fun brain challenge like magic squares has been both fascinating and a lot of fun, he says … much like his Maryville College experience has been.
“I can’t wait to get back to campus, because I miss being there in person,” he says. “I’m excited to graduate, and it’s been a long time coming — if I hadn’t done this alternating-semester internship, I would have graduated last spring. But I’m really happy for the opportunity, and I couldn’t imagine I would have gotten it anywhere else.”