MCM/ICM Contest Results

Mudd competes in the Putnam each year, but in my personal opinion, the International Mathematical Contest in Modeling and Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling are even better fits with our curriculum and collaborative emphasis.  Here's Professor Susan Martonosi's description of the contests:

The MCM/ICM is analogous to an applied Putnam exam, in the form of a grueling-96 hour competition. As Ben Fusaro, creator of the contest in 1983, puts it: "Most problems that come up in business, government, or industry are solved by teams, are likely to take many hours, and would not be restricted to using only pencil and paper. Moreover, the answer must be presented to an executive who wants a clear understandable response." Thus, during the contest, students work in teams of up to three students and have 96 consecutive hours to develop a mathematical model and write a formal paper describing their work. The team's papers are judged not only on their scientific and mathematical accuracy, but also on their clarity of exposition, insight and creativity. 

Sounds kinda like an abbreviated, low-budget version of Clinic, no?  Anyway, this year seven teams from HMC chose to compete.  Here were the topics they attacked back in February:

(A) Maximizing "vertical air" achievable on a snowboarding half-pipe
(B) Minimizing the number of cell phone repeaters needed to serve a geographical area
(C) Modeling the social, environmental, health and economic impacts of Electric Vehicles

Cool problems, huh?  And they really do sound like Clinic projects, especially problem B) -- so not surprisingly, that's what the top-scoring HMC team chose to attack.  Dylan Marriner (CS/M '12), Louis Ryan (Math '12) and Daniel Furlong (CS/M '12) earned the top designation of Outstanding (given to only 8 teams out of the 2775 entries worldwide!) and the SIAM Prize.
 
Another HMC team earned the designation Meritorious (top 15%), three earned Honorable Mention (top 45%), and two were Successful Participants.  Several first-year students competed, which made me happy, and our very own blogger David Rolfe was named a "successful participant" (be proud, David, be proud).

For complete results and judges' commentaries, see http://www.comap.com/undergraduate/contests/mcm/contests/2011/results/  The site also posts all the contest problems going back to 2000, so if you have some free time, you can even try the MCM/ICM for yourself.  Enjoy!