Skip to main content

Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications

2024 is required

Models for Olympic Medal Tables

In addition to watching individual events during the latest summer Olympic Games in Paris, 2024, fans followed the overall “medal table” for each country. The final results (Table 1) showed the United States with the most total medals (126), and China...

Infectious Learning at NCTM 2024

COMAP is excited to team up with Operation Outbreak (OO) at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Annual Meeting in Chicago, September 25–27 to help teachers learn how to run simulations of disease outbreaks and study the related mathematics...

The Weather Forecaster Problem

Suppose you have two forecasts for tomorrow's weather. Forecast A predicts a 60% chance of rain, while Forecast B predicts an 80% chance of rain. If it rains tomorrow, would you consider Forecast B a better forecast than Forecast A? And if so, how much...

Composing in Bach’s Style Using Mathematical Transformations

We propose a new method for music composition in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach, using geometrical transformations of the plane. The method consists of analyzing a classical opus, identifying the motif, and mapping the occurrences of this motif and...

Same-Score Streaks in Basketball and in Other Sports

Target Audience Students with a background in probability and statistics. Abstract We present a real-world problem of interest to undergraduate students in courses on probability, mathematical modeling, or sports analytics. The topic is the likelihood...

Proximity: Modeling Rainfall

The context for this Modeling Pull‑Out is estimating the amount of rainfall in a certain region based on rain gauges spread across the region. This Pull‑Out begins with a Preliminary Reading, Colorado Needs Rain Until It Gets Too Much, which introduces...

Proximity: Modeling Rainfall (Modeling Module)

The context for this Modeling Module is estimating the amount of rainfall in a certain region based on rain gauges spread across the region. This module begins with a Preliminary Reading, Colorado Needs Rain Until It Gets Too Much, which introduces...

Modeling Airline Scheduling

The context for this Modeling Pull‑Out is airline scheduling. It begins with a preliminary reading, Networks, which provides a brief introduction to graph theory and its application to a variety of networks. This is followed by a preliminary activity,...

Mathematical Models of Lyme Disease: An Overview

Lyme disease is the most common vector-borne disease in the United States. It is caused by bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi and transmitted to humans by blacklegged ticks. The transmission is a complex process that involves several different non-human...

Dalton’s Law of Evaporation

Model Reality Check We present a differential equation that models the process of evaporation from a free-water surface, based on the principle of conservation of mass and Dalton’s evaporation law. We collected experimental data to verify the accuracy...

Fair Allocation

Introduction The general public, students in public school mathematics classes, future teachers, and even mathematics majors are typically not aware that many mathematics researchers have done and are still doing research about applying mathematics to...

The FA Cup Soccer Tournament: Probabilities vs. Predictions

Introduction The Football Association Challenge Cup, more commonly known as the FA Cup, is an annual knockout tournament in men’s English professional football. (It is now known officially as The Emirates FA Cup after its current sponsor. There is also...

Making Graph Theory Relevant

Abstract We describe how we used contextual teaching and learning principles to build a graph theory project for mathematics courses at the U.S. Air Force Academy. We leveraged an Air Force targeting scenario to make the mathematics relevant to our...

Teaching Mathematical Modeling In a Sustainability Context

Abstract Within the tertiary education framework, we developed a pilot course focused on mathematical modeling, placing a distinct emphasis on sustainability and sustainable development. While an applicable textbook exists for this liberal arts course,...

A Geometrical Sculpture Inspires a Geometrical Construction

While doing my Holiday shopping at the Derby Street Mall. I came across the polyhedral sculpture shown in Figure 1a. Examining it carefully I saw that it had 12 Pentagonal pyramids sticking out from a dodecahedral core. I suspected it was a transformed...

Quadrilaterals Via a Paper Folding Approach

Every day when the mail arrives, I typically get an array of items which consist of a single rectangular "postcard" which until recently typically headed to my bag of paper for recycling, often without reading the message on the card. However, for a...

Searching for Submersibles

Background: Maritime Cruises Mini-Submarines (MCMS), a company based in Greece, builds submersibles capable of carrying humans to the deepest parts of the ocean. A submersible is moved to the location and deployed untethered from a host ship. MCMS now...

Momentum in Tennis

Background: In the 2023 Wimbledon Gentlemen’s final, 20-year-old Spanish rising star Carlos Alcaraz defeated 36-year-old Novak Djokovic. The loss was Djokovic’s first at Wimbledon since 2013 and ended a remarkable run for one of the all-time great...