A team of mathematics students participated in theConsortium for Mathematics and Its Applications Mathematical Contest in Modeling on February 4-8, 2021.
Mikayla Dokos (secondary mathematics education, from Homer City, Pa.), Elizabeth Lees (mathematics, dance arts, from Ebensburg, Pa.), andMicayla Schambura (chemistry, environmental engineering, from Irwin, Pa.) submitted the solution to the modeling problem "Checking the Pulse and Temperature of Higher Education" after a long, intense, extended weekend of work.
In their report, the team addressed the questions, "What does it mean for a nation to have a healthy, sustainable higher education system? What issues matter? Is it cost, access, equity, funding, value of a degree, quality of education, level of research, exchange of ideas of the world's brightest minds, some of the above, all of the above, or something else altogether?"
Schambura, Lees, and Dokos (top photo, L to R) now must wait until late April to see how their solution measured up against those submitted by thousands of other teams from around the world.
The Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (COMAP) runs the Mathematical Contest in Modeling each year, attracting teams from over 900 institutions from around the world, challenging them to clarify, analyze, and propose solutions to open-ended problems. For the past few years, John Chrispell has been the faculty adviser, preparing teams before the contest, although advisers are not allowed to aid the team in any manner once the contest begins. Chrispell recently wrote on past IUP students' success in the contest in an article in SIAM News.