Students Participated in International Mathematics Modeling Contest
Posted on Thursday, February 25, 2010
Two three-member teams of Westminster College students participated in the International Mathematical Contest in Modeling Feb. 18-22.
The Westminster teams were: Mikayla Barcus, Anthony Caratelli, and Stephen Rossi; and Stephen Donnel, Joshua Glasser, and Nikki Snyder.
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 Westminster teams were under the direction of Dr. David Offner, Westminster assistant professor of mathematics.
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 the design of a model to help police catch criminals and the other to model properties of baseball bats.
Each team chooses one of the two problems to analyze and propose a solution. Participants research the area, develop strategies to model the system, compare proposed solutions, run simulations, and write 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 www.comap.com/contests for additional information.
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