Posted on Wednesday, March 2, 2011
A dozen ¾¨Ó㴫ý students participated in the International Mathematical Contest in Modeling Feb. 10-14.
The students worked in teams of three: Anthony Caratelli, Bethany Ekimoff, and Robert Rhodes; Stephen Donnel, Amanda Gentzel, and Joshua Glasser; Lisa Kaylor, Timothy Matyas, and Aaron Zavora; and Gregory Clark, Amber Hill, and Jenna Huston.
The Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) is a unique international contest designed to challenge teams of students to clarify, analyze, and propose solutions to open-ended problems. The contest attracts diverse students and faculty advisers from over 500 institutions around the world. The ¾¨Ó㴫ý teams were under the direction of ¾¨Ó㴫ý mathematics faculty Dr. Carolyn Cuff, professor, and Dr. David Offner, assistant professor.
The contest provides students with an experience similar to that which an applied mathematician or other quantitative scientist is likely to encounter in industry or in a research laboratory. Problems are chosen to model real-world situations and generally do not have a known solution or unique method of attack. One of this year's problems involved designing a snowboard course to maximize the "vertical air" achievable by a skilled snowboarder and the other analyzed the role of repeaters in VHF radio communication.
Each team chose one of the two problems to analyze and propose a solution. Participants researched the area, developed strategies to model the system, solved the problem, compared proposed solutions quantitatively, implemented the strategies on the computer, used programs to generate data, and wrote a formal paper. Completed papers were submitted to the Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications, who oversaw the competition.
Papers are graded by a national team of mathematicians on the likelihood that the proposed method would lead to a reasonable solution, at least under certain simplified conditions. The written proposal is crucial, since the method must be clearly understood by someone reading the proposal for only a short time, and sufficient experimentation must be done to convince the reader the approach is valid.
Contact Offner at (724) 946-7293 (e-mail offnerde@westminster.edu) or visit for additional information.
