Students Participate in Math Modeling Contest

The results of the 2018 International Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) and Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling (ICM) have been announced. Three Harvey Mudd College teams competed against others from around the world (10,670 teams in the MCM and 9,932 in the ICM).

In ICM competition, Colin Adams ’19, Rachel Barcklay ’20 and Carla Becker ’18 earned the ICM Honorable Mention, and Nelll (sic) White ’19, Marina Knittel ’18 and Mackenzie Kong-Sivert ’19 earned Successful Participant. In the MCM, Xingyao Chen ’20, Nick Koskelo ’20 and Tyler Sam ’20 earned Successful Participant.

The concurrent competitions give each team 96 consecutive hours to develop a mathematical model that solves a real-world problem and then write a formal paper describing their work. Solutions are judged not only in terms of scientific and mathematical accuracy, but also on clarity of exposition, insight and creativity.

The annual contests present an array of real-world problems in continuous, discrete or interdisciplinary mathematics that require ingenuity, collaboration and strong communication in order to be tackled effectively. This year’s problems addressed topics such as multi-hop high frequency radio propagation, energy production, the influence of climate change on regional instability and the cost of privacy.

The MCM and ICM are organized by the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (COMAP), a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve mathematics education for students of all ages and create learning environments where mathematics is used to investigate and model real-world issues.