Mathematical Contest in Modeling 2007: A Judge’s
Perspective
June 12, 2007
Longtime SIAM MCM judge James Case, after a weekend in California reading and ranking
solution papers submitted for this year's "discrete" problem, discusses the complexities of the
problem and outlines some of the approaches devised by the undergraduate teams.
Between February 8 and February 12, 2007, 949 teams from 12 countries participated in the
23rd annual Mathematical Contest in Modeling. Three hundred fifty-one of the three-person
teams elected to work on the "continuous" problem A, and 598 chose the "discrete" problem B.
A total of 14 papers were judged "outstanding": five for problem A (two from the University of
Washington, and one each from Harvard, MIT, and Duke) and nine for problem B (two from
Duke, and one each from Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri; Stellenbosch
University, South Africa; Singapore National University; Peking University; the University of
Puget Sound; the National University of Defense Technology, China; and Slippery Rock
University, Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania).
The authors of two of the outstanding papers were named the SIAM winners: the team from
MIT for problem A (see "MIT's 'Dream Team' Wins SIAM Award for MCM 2007" for
highlights of the team's four-year MCM run) and the team from Stellenbosch---Louise Viljoen,
Chris Rohwer, and Andreas Hafver, with faculty adviser Jan van Vuuren---as described here.
With no SIAM Annual Meeting scheduled for this year, the SIAM winners will present their
papers at the 2008 meeting. In the meantime, the UMAP Journal intends to publish five of the
outstanding papers.
The students who worked on the continuous problem were asked to devise a method for
dividing a state into the constitutionally mandated number of congressional districts having the
"simplest" possible geometric shapes, after which they were to apply their method to the state
of New York. The definition of "simplest" was left to the individual teams, who had only to
justify their choice in terms that would be understandable to the public at large. Judges
assigned to the problem reported that contestants reformulated the problem in a wide variety
of ways, and employed an impressive variety of solution techniques.
The discrete problem concerned protocols for boarding and deboarding passenger aircraft.
With the advent of ever-larger planes---the new Airbus model A380 is expected to hold as
many as 800 seats in some configurations---the time spent on the ground (the bulk of which is
devoted to on- and offloading of passengers) can represent a significant fraction of the time an
aircraft and/or crew is in service, as well as a significant drain on airline revenues. Contestants
were asked to devise and compare procedures for boarding and deboarding aircraft of
different sizes: small (85–210 seats), midsize (211–330), and large (450–800).
资源评论
