Albion Math Students Take Regional Competition

Albion Makes Second Win in Four Years
May 11, 2007
 

Story by Jake Weber

Three Albion math majors cemented their department's reputation as a force to be reckoned with, as the second Albion team in four years to win the Lower Michigan Mathematics Competition (LMMC) held earlier this spring in Grand Rapids. Junior Carmen Weddell and sophomores Jeremy Troisi and Whitney Patton represented Albion against 34 other teams from 11 institutions. With 72 of a possible 100 points, Albion beat the second-place Kalamazoo team by two points.

The LMMC is a harsh test, drawing its 10 problems from  the entire undergraduate mathematics curriculum. "The team has to be prepared for anything, because they have no idea, from year to year, what might be on the test," said Albion mathematics professor Mark Bollman, one of the team's advisers.

"We went into the competition thinking it would be a good experience," said Patton.  "We didn't worry about how we mesured up to the other teams."

"We just treated it like a bunch of interesting problems, not a hard, important test," said Troisi, explaining the team's strategy. "We focused on what we knew we could do, and just tried to work fast."

"One thing that helped was that we all have different strengths," Weddell added. "We each worked on the problems we are best at."

One stroke of luck for the students was a problem Troisi and Weddell had done in a geometry class earlier that year. "It was a really hard problem to solve," recalled Weddell. Added Troisi, "When you have something really difficult like that, you tend to remember the steps you had to take to get to the answer."

On the most difficult problem of the exam, only two schools scored any points -- in Albion's case, they scored the two points that helped with their victory.  "That problem had an obvious solution that led to the wrong answer," said Weddell. "I remembered a theorem we had studied in another class, and even though we didn't finish the problem, we got points for having the right idea of how to solve it."

In 2004, an Albion team won the competition for the first time, breaking a 28-year hold by Kalamazoo, Hope and Calvin Colleges. In the LMMC's 31-year history, only five schools (including Ferris State) have won the competition.