Math Champs
uke students have won North America’s most prestigious event
of its kind for undergraduates, the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical
Competition, for the third time since 1993. A separate team was also
a top placer, for Duke’s fourth year in a row, in the illustrious
Mathematical Contest in Modeling, sponsored by the Consortium of Mathematics
and its Applications
Duke’s official three-member Putnam team, which included senior
John Clyde and juniors Nathan Curtis and Kevin Lacker, out-competed
teams from Caltech, Harvard, M.I.T., and the University of Toronto
in the grueling event. Administered by the Mathematical Association
of America, the competition featured 2,818 students from 434 colleges
and universities in the United States and Canada vying to solve twelve
very challenging problems—so challenging that the median score
was only 1 out of the 120 possible points. About half the students
scored zero. Clyde, of New Plymouth, Idaho; Curtis, of Reston, Virginia;
and Lacker, of Cincinnati, were each among the top fifteen scorers
and, under the Putnam’s complicated rules, their team won first
place overall. They will each receive $2,000 and Duke will receive
$25,000.
Students participated in Putnam competitions on their individual campuses
in December, but the results are not announced until March. Nineteen
Duke students competed in the 2001 Putnam. According to the rules,
only three students can be designated as the school’s official
team.
Another Duke senior, Carl Miller, of Bethesda, Maryland, was also
among the top fifteen scorers, although he was not a team member.
He will receive $1,000. Duke freshman David Arthur, of Toronto, and
senior Michael Colsher, of Waukesha, Wisconsin, won honorable mention
for scoring in the top 2 percent of competitors.
Lacker, a mathematics and computer science double major and a Goldwater
Scholar, led the Duke participants by scoring 85 points. He was followed
closely by Clyde, a computer science major who also plays drums in
the Pep Band, as well as by Curtis.
Miller, the other Putnam top-fifteen scorer from Duke, joined Duke
junior Sam Malone, of Zebulon, North Carolina, and senior Daniel Neill,
of Tampa, Florida, to place the university at the top ranks of the
Mathematical Contest in Modeling, a different kind of event requiring
students to design and justify a mathematical model of a real-world
problem over a long ninety-six-hour weekend.
Working from 12:01 a.m. on Friday, February 9 to 11:59 p.m. on Monday,
February 12, the trio wrote a forty-seven-page paper describing strategies
to evacuate by road a half-million people from hurricane-threatened
coastal communities. The scenario was modeled on a flawed evacuation
in South Carolina during Hurricane Floyd in 1999, when “authorities
made one large announcement to everyone at the same time so that everyone
all of a sudden tried to evacuate,” says Miller. “That led
to huge bottlenecks. A trip that usually takes a couple of hours took
eighteen hours.”
A total of 579 teams from around the globe competed in this year’s
modeling contest, supported by the National Security Agency, Mathematical
Association of America, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics,
and the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science.
Competing students get to choose between two problems, and the very
best solutions—about 2 percent of the total—are judged as
Outstanding. Those winning teams are presented with plaques, and their
papers will be published in the journal Undergraduate Mathematics
and its Applications.
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