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Math team earns high marks in worldwide contest

UD math team members (from left) Lauren Rossi, Kathleen Servis, faculty adviser Lou Rossi and Sumanth Swaminathan discuss differential equations.
4:23 p.m., April 27, 2004--Three UD students—Lauren Rossi, a senior, and Kathleen Servis, a junior, both in mathematical sciences, and Sumanth Swaminathan, a junior chemical engineering major—placed in the top 11 percent of the worldwide Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications (MCM) mathematical modeling competition. This year, 599 teams from around the world competed.

Team adviser Lou Rossi, assistant professor of mathematical sciences (and no relation to Lauren), said, "This year's team consisted of three students with very strong mathematical backgrounds and diverse interests. The students were not only individually strong, but worked well together to produce an excellent analysis of establishing a person's identity using fingerprints. The beautiful thing about mathematics is that it is transferable to any intellectual pursuit, including forensic science, the subject of this year's contest question.”

Teams of three undergraduates from universities all over the world tackled an online open mathematical modeling problem during a four-day period. Typically, problems are developed by practitioners in government, industry or academia to put real-world problems under a mathematical lens, demonstrating how real people are using mathematics in their jobs and lives.

For example, the problem chosen by this year's UD team required them to develop and analyze a model that would assess the probability that fingerprints are truly unique. Then, they were asked to compare the odds of misidentification by fingerprint evidence against the odds of misidentification by DNA evidence.

The results of their work were submitted as a self-contained report, which was judged by a panel of mathematicians and expert practitioners.

A detailed report on the results from this year's contest can be found at [www.comap.com/undergraduate/contests/mcm/contests/2004/results/mcm.php].

Article by Barbara Garrison
Photo by Duane Perry

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