June 2012

The COMAP Mathematical Contest in Modeling is an international undergraduate math competition held every year in February. It is held over a four-day weekend, during which students are required to use mathematical modeling to solve real world problems and submit a report detailing their findings. I participated in the competition in 2012 with a team of two other WWU students. The problem we worked on involved scheduling recreational river rafting trips down a hypothetical river that had a limited number of uniformly distributed campsites. We managed to devise an algorithm to simulate the movement of rafting trips between campsites, and used that simulation to solve the problem presented to us.

It was a brutal and sleepless weekend trying to get the report completed in time for the 5pm Monday deadline. But our efforts paid off when we received the results and found out that from among the 3697 submissions, our paper had been chosen as winner and was going to be published in The UMAP Journal. A copy of our paper can be found here.