ICM Award
О том как мы выграли второе почетное место на Интернациональном конкурсе математического моделирования.Students honored in international math competition
Think of it as "NUMB3RS" with an environmental science twist.
While the hit TV show uses complicated math to solve crimes, a team of students from California State University, Monterey Bay used it to solve a problem involving aquaculture networks.
The team - Erin Frolli, Tatsiana Maskalevich and Hannah Potter - had 96 hours to tackle a question in the Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling, a complex problem-solving competition. The problem required teams to understand water-quality issues, biodiversity of coral reefs and marine ecological relationships.
The problems are designed to give students a glimpse of what mathematicians might do outside of academia. The problems are taken from the fields of science, engineering and industry.
CSU Monterey Bay's team won a Meritorious Award, the second-highest honor, which placed them in the top 10 percent of the 374 teams that entered the competition. Two schools were designated as outstanding - China University of Mining and Technology and the U.S. Military Academy. Eight percent of the teams came from U.S. colleges and universities; the rest came from China, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates.
The teams downloaded the problem from the Internet on the evening of Feb. 5, and then had four days to research, analyze, model and communicate a solution.
They didn't get much sleep during the long weekend of work, but "I advised them not to stay up all night - they needed a clear mind to tackle the problem," said team adviser and math professor Dr. Hongde Hu.
The students explained their solution in a polished academic paper - including diagrams and graphs - that was submitted to the contest judges. With so many entries, it takes several months to score the papers; this year's results were just released.
CSUMB has done well in the contest in the past. The university has entered the contest annually since 2003; it earned honorable mentions that year, in 2005, 2007 and again last year. In 2006, it was a meritorious winner, putting it in the top 15 percent of all entries.
"At CSUMB, the contest is one of many math-based activities that help to interest new students in the field of mathematics because of the interdisciplinary nature of the contest," Dr. Hu said.
That appealed to the team's members. Frolli, a junior from Susanville, has a double major - in math and environmental science, technology and policy (ESTP). Potter, a junior from Ontario, is majoring in ESTP with a math minor. Maskalevich, a senior originally from Belarus, is the only math major on the team.
"The Math Department tries to avoid teaching students math in a vacuum - whether they major in it or not. We teach students that if you learn a little bit more mathematics, you can do a lot of intelligent reading on many different topics," Dr. Hu said.
"Our faculty encourage all students who do reasonably well in one class to consider taking another class. Many students take a second math class, then a third or a fourth, and eventually realize they could take a few more courses and be able to add a math major.
"It's mostly a matter of allowing the subject to sell itself," Dr. Hu said.
The contest was administered by the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to improve math education for students of all ages. The National Science Foundation provided the funding.
http://news.csumb.edu/site/x24095.xml