May 11, 2005 == MEDIA ADVISORY
<<<Contact Gary Talsma at 616-526-6422 or tals@calvin.edu >>>
For the 14th time in 29 years a team from Calvin College has won the annual
Lower Michigan Mathematics Competition.
The event was held April 2 at the University of Michigan-Flint (it is held
every spring at an institution in the lower peninsula of the state of Michigan)
and the results were just recently released.
Calvin led a quartet of West Michigan schools in the top 10 (a total of 27
teams were entered in the competition).
The three-man Calvin squad of John Engbers (Grand Rapids/GR Christian), Kyle
Glashower (Hudsonville/Unity Christian) and Matt Voorman (Thousand Oaks, CA)
topped all 27 teams with 75 points. Albion was second with 66 points, while
Grand Valley State's squad was third with 62 points, Aquinas College was fifth
and Hope College was sixth.
The annual competition is pretty simple: undergraduate students from
four-year colleges and universities from the state of Michigan gather to
challenge themselves on 10 interesting problems (see below for two examples).
Students compete in teams of up to three members, and each team has three hours
to write solutions to the problems without the assistance of calculators,
computers or books.
Calvin mathematics professor Gary Talsma notes that the school represented by
the winning team takes possession of the Klein Bottle trophy, an honor Calvin
has secured 14 times since the competition began (Hope has won the event 10
times, Kalamazoo four times and Albion once).
That trophy is a wooden pedestal with brass plates on which name of winning
school is engraved annually. It is topped by a three-dimensional cross-section
of a glass Klein bottle (a Klein bottle is a four-dimensional object having
neither inside nor outside that is named for German geometer Felix Klein).
TWO SAMPLE PROBLEMS FROM 2005
Find, with proof, the largest whole number that cannot be written as the sum
of two composite whole numbers. (Recall that a whole number greater than 1 is
"prime" if its only divisors are itself and 1; otherwise the number is
"composite". Some small prime numbers are: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23. Some
small composite numbers are: 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22.)
Suppose there are 3 lines in 3-dimensional space, no two of which are
parallel. Prove or disprove: there is a fourth line that
passes through each of the other three lines.
Received on Tue May 10 16:04:12 2005
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Tue May 10 2005 - 16:04:12 EDT