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2008 SIAM Student Prizes
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With no annual meeting held in 2007, the program for the 2008 SIAM Annual Meeting featured an impressive array of student presentations—by recipients of the 2007 and 2008 SIAM awards in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling and the SIAM Student Paper Prize.
Having spent 38 hours in the air to attend the SIAM Annual Meeting in San Diego, the SIAM winning team for the discrete problem in MCM 2007 might be expected to know something about air travel. Indeed, the problem solved by the team—left to right, Andreas Hafver, Louise Viljoen, and Chris Rohwer (not pictured is faculty adviser Jan van Vuuren), from the University of Stellenbosch, Republic of South Africa—was called The Airplane Seating Problem. In their solution paper, “Boarding—Step by Step: A Cellular Automaton Approach to Optimizing Aircraft Boarding Time,” judge James Case explained in the June 2007 issue of SIAM News, the students tested, via simulation, a total of ten airplane boarding protocols before concluding that the “reverse pyramid method,” with about nine seating groups, “performs as well as any.” Time spent on the ground might always be an insignificant part of their own international travel, but the team’s thorough analysis, if heeded by airlines, could alleviate annoying delays for travelers making shorter trips.
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Amy Evans (left) and Tracy Stepien of SUNY, University at Buffalo—the winning SIAM team for the continuous problem in MCM 2008. Teams opting for that problem, Take a Bath, were asked to model the effects on land of the melting of the North Polar Ice Cap under the influence of global warming, with emphasis on metropolitan areas along the Florida coast at 10-year intervals over the next 50 years. They were also to identify appropriate responses to the expected changes. The Buffalo team (whose faculty adviser was John Ringland), titled their solution “Fighting the Waves: The Effect of North Polar Ice Cap Melt on Florida.” Graduate school is in the future for both team members, in mathematical biology (Stepien) and mathematics or computer science (Evans), and they are further linked by their strong interest and talent in an unrelated area: music.
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Christopher Chang represented the Harvard team, named the SIAM winner for the discrete problem in MCM 2008; Chang’s teammates were Zhou Fan and Yi Sun and Clifford Taubes was their faculty adviser. The problem, Creating Sudoku Puzzles, entailed the development of an algorithm for generating Sudoku puzzles, analysis of its complexity, and illustration of its use by generating puzzles of at least four different levels of difficulty. Finally, in what judge James Case considers the trickiest part of the problem, the students were to develop a metric for measuring the level of difficulty of a given puzzle—requiring a focus on the methods used in the actual solution of Sudoku puzzles, and distinction between elementary, intermediate, and advanced techniques. The Harvard team’s solution was titled “hsolve: A Difficulty Metric and Puzzle Generator for Sudoku.”
SIAM Student Paper Prizes
2007 Recipients
Thomas T. Bringley, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University
“Validation of a Simple Method for Representing Spheres and Slender Bodies in an Immersed Boundary Method for Stokes Flow on an Unbounded Domain”
Co-Author: Charles S. Peskin, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University
Nir Gavish, Tel Aviv University
“Singular Ring Solutions of Critical and Supercritical Nonlinear Schrödinger Equations”
Co-Authors: Gadi Fibich, Tel Aviv University, and Xiao-Ping Wang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
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Kristoffer G. van der Zee, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
“An H1(Ph)-Coercive Discontinuous Galerkin Formulation for the Poisson Problem: 1-D Analysis”
Co-Authors: E.H. van Brummelen and R. de Borst, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
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2008 Recipients
Jeremy Brandman, University of California at Los Angeles
“A Level-Set Method for Computing the Eigenvalues of Elliptic Operators Defined on Closed Surfaces”
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Roland Griesmaier, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany
“An Asymptotic Factorization Method for Inverse Electromagnetic Scattering in Layered Media”
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David Ketcheson, University of Washington
“Highly Efficient Strong Stability Preserving Runge–Kutta Methods with Low Storage Implementations”