Students Shine At Mathematical Assn. Contest

Claremont McKenna College students Sarah Awad, Cameron Pinckney, and Carolyn Staples have won prizes for their work in the 2002 Undergraduate Student Poster Session, a major event of the joint annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Association for Women in Mathematics. Held last month in San Diego, the CMC student posters were honored out of 82 submissions from 185 students researching mathematical problems and issues, and documenting findings on posters.
Mathematicians from Grinnell, the University of Notre Dame, and Purdue and Loyola Marymount universities were among the 99 judges who evaluated entries for mathematical content, answers given by presenters, and poster design. Fifteen non-ranked prizes of $100 were awarded.
Awad, a junior from La Canada, Calif., presented A Statistical Analysis of Combined Deterministic and Random Charges. With supervision from Professor Janet Myhre, director of the Reed Institute of Decision Science at CMC, Awad worked on the hypothesis that certain sets of data may follow a more stochastic, or random, process over time.
Sophomores Pinckney and Staples --- from Bremerton, Wash., and Upland, Calif., respectively --- worked with CMC mathematics professor Mario Martelli, on The Flat Roof Problem, exploring how volumes of solids can be represented by the space between a base and a linear function ("the flat roof") above it.
Research was conducted with support from CMC's Reed Institute. The Poster Session was founded in the 1990s to foster undergraduate student research.