The Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications recently announced the results of the International Math Modeling Competition, with HSU earning a laudable spots among the teams. In total, 1162 teams competed, with about 25 percent of the teams from the U.S., and the remainder from Australia, Canada, China, Finland, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, Jamaica, Mexico, Korea, Singapore, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.
This year’s competition ran from Thursday, February 14 to Monday, February 18. During that time, two student teams from the Environmental Resources Engineering Department put their math modeling skills to the test.
The first team, made up of Karen Wetherow, Jason Roberts and Jordan Pierce worked on the "Creating Sudoku Puzzles" problem, which required the students to develop an algorithm to construct Sudoku puzzles of varying difficulty. The trio received a score of Meritorious, which placed them in the top 14 percent of all teams entered in the competition, with only 9 teams scoring higher.
A second team, consisting of Nir Berezovsky, Cameron Bracken and Timothy Weigard, worked on the "Take A Bath" problem, in which students were tasked with developing of a model to determine the effects on the Florida coast from the melting of the north polar ice cap due to the predicted increase in global temperatures. This team received an Honorable Mention score, with only 15 percent of the teams receiving a higher score.
The author of the "Take A Bath" problem, Professor Jerry Griggs of the University of South Carolina, also required students to pose appropriate responses to the changes in coastline, thus providing a real-world context for students to work in. Griggs also served as a judge in the competition. The "Creating Sudoku Puzzles" problem was authored by Veena Mendiratta, of Lucent Technologies. Mendiratta was also a judge.
The 2008 MCM/ICM results are now available on the comap Website: http://www.comap.com/undergraduate/contests/mcm/contests/2008/results/