Students Win Prizes in Math Contest

Stas Sheynkop

31 March 2004 -- The Penn State Math Club kicked off its First Annual Mathematics Competition this spring with 75 undergraduate students competing for cash awards by answering eleven mind-bending questions. According to Stas Sheynkop, president of the club, the exam questions did not require a great deal of mathematical background to answer correctly because the event was designed for all Penn State undergraduate students, both math majors and non-math majors alike. "One of our questions, for example, involved two ropes, one that takes exactly 60 minutes to burn from one end to the other," he says. "We noted that the ropes do not burn at an even rate, so all the contestants could assume is the total burn time. Then we asked them to figure out how they could measure the passage of 45 minutes of time by burning the ropes." The club has published the answer to this problem, as well as the rest of the contest questions and answers, on the web at <www.clubs.psu.edu/up/math/>.

Brian Feldman

Winners of the five cash prizes include Brian Feldman, a mechanical engineering major, who won the $100 first-place prize, Russ Shanahan, a computer science major, who won the $80 second-place prize; Scott Markley, an electical engineering major, who won the $60 third-place prize; Michael F. Logan, an actuarial science and mathematics major, who won the $40 fourth-place prize; and Jeff Vollmer, a music major, who won the $20 fifth-place prize. Honorable Mention awards went to Kevin Chan, Robert Opdyke, Jon Smock, Jessica Leonard, Jeannie Testa, and Daniel Michelson-Horowitz.

Funds for the prizes were donated by the Department of Mathematics.

[ B K K / Barbara Baum ]

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