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Aydin Gerek ’07 (Istanbul, Turkey) took the $500 prize for first place in the 2004 Individual Barge Mathematics Contest, held Saturday in Pardee Hall room 227. The competition is open to first-year students and sophomores.
Jacob Carson ’06 (New Richmond, Ohio) received $300 for second place and Haotian Wu ’07 (Jiangsu, China) was awarded $200 for third.
Five students earned Honorable Mention: Matthew Coughlin ’07 (Boyertown, Pa.), Teruhisa Haruguchi ’07 (Short Hills, N.J.), John Kolba ’06 (Chelmsford, Mass.), Ko Ko Maung ’07 (Tharkayta Yangon, Myanmar), and Zachary Reiter ’07 (Easton, Pa.).
“I was pleasantly surprised that 22 students took part this year,” says organizer Louis Zulli, assistant professor of mathematics. “This may have been the largest turnout in recent years, and it reflects the growing level of accomplishment of our students, and the efforts of Derek Smith, Ethan Berkove, Ekaterina Jager ’05, and others who have so successfully promoted the department’s problem-solving activities.”
Individual Barge problems vary in difficulty; most emphasize insight and ingenuity rather than specific knowledge or computational skill.
Sample question:
How many lattice points in the first quadrant lie on the line 2x+3y=763? A lattice point is a point whose x- and y-coordinates are whole numbers.
Answer:
There’s one lattice point for each odd value of y between 1 and 253 inclusive, making 127 points in all.
Several of the students who achieved high scores in Individual Barge excelled in prior math contests this school year. Carson shared the $600 prize for winning the Team Barge Competition with two teammates — Jager (Tashkent, Uzbekistan), who is pursing a B.S. in electrical & computer engineering and B.A. in mathematics, and chemical engineering major Maria Azimova ’06 (Tashkent, Uzbekistan). Team Barge is a problem-solving challenge sponsored by the math department in which teams of three to five students attempt to solve a different weekly problem over eight weeks.
Second place in Team Barge went to Gerek, Maung, and biochemistry major Myat Lin ’04 (Yangon, Myanmar), who split $450. A total of $300 was awarded to third-place finishers Wu, Haruguchi, and Smathi Charanasomboon ’07 (Bangkok, Thailand).
The Lafayette students with the highest individual scores in the William Powell Putnam Mathematical Competition were Reiter(score of 18, national rank of 498.5); Jager(14, 549); Carson, Gerek, electrical and computer engineering major Josh Porter ’06, and mathematics major Brian Regan ’06 (10, 905.5); and Wu (8, 1120.5).
Lafayette’s three-student Putnam team finished within the top quarter of participating schools with a rank of 111. The exam is described by Time magazine as “the world’s toughest math test.” A total of 3,615 undergraduate students from more than 450 colleges and universities in North America participated.
The math department sponsors a Problem Solving Group that meets each week to discuss and solve mathematics problems, which helps students prepare for the Team and Individual Barge Competitions, the Lehigh Valley Association of Independent Colleges (LVAIC) Math Contest, and the William Powell Putnam Mathematical Competition. For the past four years, a Lafayette team has taken first place in the LVAIC Math Contest.