Drury Math Students Place in Top 120 out of 900 Schools

By Brandon Ferrell, University Communications

If you thought math in the real world was just balancing your checkbook, ask the Drury students who just recently received high honors in a modeling competition (think calculus, not Victoria's Secret).

Given open-ended problems by Consortium on Mathematics and its Applications (COMAP), students from more than 900 colleges and high schools were given four days to develop their own solution. Junior Matt Ruth and his two teammates worked on developing a system for irrigating a field. It wasn't as simple as it sounds.

“We used information researched at Missouri State University about sprinkler systems and agriculture, applying properties of physics such as Bernoulli's equation for describing the motion of a fluid and flow rate properties. We also wrote a small Java program to help compute our answer,” Ruth says.

Dr. Keith Coates, one of the group's advisors, also applauds the team's tenacity, saying “Each team works at their home institution to solve their problem in essentially four days and nights. On those days, if one had gone into the basement of Pearsons Hall, one would have seen student teams slaving away over white board calculations, hunching over computers, arguing about technical aspects of their problems, and munching on pizza; in general, having a great time.”

Matt's team, including Anna Madras and Adam Scott, received the rank of Meritorious Winner, placing them in the top 120 schools for their work.

“I was a bit surprised,” he says. “We had worked on it pretty hard for four days straight, and I was a becoming a bit discouraged with our progress. However, our hard work paid off in the end, and we turned in a pretty successful paper. I think, over all, what we did was noteworthy. I'm just glad we got something out of being in a room for four days doing math.”

The team of Elizabeth Higgins, Amanda Johnson, and Cody Pace, all first-time participants, received an honorable mention. And freshmen Natalie James and Jenny Parsons, for their work on a plan to move special-needs passengers between terminals at airports, received a Successful Participant designation.

Dr. Coates is enjoying their success. “I feel very proud and satisfied at what these students achieved. We had three successful teams from Drury! It reflects very well on our students' ability and commitment. I am glad to have been their advisor, along with Dr. Bruce Callen in physics, but the students clearly deserve all the credit!”