McEwen ’05, Chidyagwai ’05, Mohney ’05, and Mehta ’06 Win Math Bowl

This year’s Math Bowl competition was won by the team of Prince Chidyagwai ’05 (Marondera, Zimbabwe), Varun Mehta ’06 (New Delhi, India), and Marquis Scholars Rob McEwen ’05 (Morgantown, Pa.) and Trent Mohney ’05 (Binghamton, N.Y.).

Sponsored by the mathematics department, the event was held Wednesday in Pardee Hall room 227. The winning students each received a Math Bowl Championship T-shirt.

McEwen is a double major in mathematics and computer science; Chidyagwai is a double major in computer science and mathematics; Mohney is a math major; and Mehta is a mechanical engineering major.

“Math Bowl is one of the highlights of the year for the students,” note Gary Gordonand Liz McMahon, professors of mathematics, in an article that will appear this year in Math Horizons, a journal for undergraduate math students. “They really get into it, cheering (and booing) their friends. It’s intentionally and unintentionally funny, especially when students show how little they know about the faculty (where they went to school, the titles of their papers, etc.). For example, when asked to name all the department members who are married to mathematicians, one student said, ‘Prof. Gordon and his wife.’ Since she happened to be judging and keeping score, she declared no credit for the response.”

One year, a dispute over scoring led a losing team of students to protest through their own T-shirts, which listed the top ten reasons why they had really won.

“Last year, when one senior, choosing his teammates wisely, finally won,” according to the professors, “he told us, ‘It took me four years, but I finally got a tee shirt!’”

The Math Bowl includes two semifinal matches of eight minutes each, then a final with seven-minute halves. The annual competition is similar to College Bowl tournaments, with a buzzer system determining which team answers each toss-up question. Students have five to ten seconds in which to answer. Toss-up questions are worth 10 points, with incorrect answers resulting in a five-point deduction. A correct answer leads to a bonus question worth more.

Question areas include:

• Pop culture: movies about math or that use math words in the title, e.g. The Matrix, A Beautiful Mind; cars with math-related names like Infiniti and Maxima; TV shows such as “The Simpsons,” etc.
• Local culture: match the faculty member to his paper, graduate school, previous employer, spouse, or first language;
• Mathematics: arithmetic, history, number theory, etc.

Sample questions from Wednesday’s competition:

• Today (April 28) is an “all-even” day: 4/28/2004 — every digit is an even number. When will the next “all-even” day be? [6/2/2004]
• When will the next all-odd day be? [1/1/3111]
• Put Professors McMahon, Reiter, Traldi, and Yuster in chronological order, from earliest to latest, based upon when they received their Ph.D.s [Yuster, Traldi, McMahon, Reiter]
• The number 10! can be expressed as 2^a*3^b*5^c*7^d. For five points apiece, find the values of a, b, c and d [a = 8, b = 4, c = 2 and d = 1; the winning team found b, c and d]

For more sample questions and the names of winners from previous years, see the Math Bowl preview article.