The papers are judged and given a ranking, either Outstanding, Meritorious, Honorable Mention, or Successful Participant. The Outstanding papers are published in the fall issue of The UMAP Journal. Anyone interested in applied math should find the MCM worthwhile. Last year, the two problems were to locate a submarine using only the noise naturally present in the ocean, and to create an optimum but fair process for judging entries in a subjective contest, such as the MCM itself. Duke entered one team, which earned a ranking of Meritorious on the submarine problem.
Good teams have a mixture of mathematical talent, writing ability, and computer skills.
Computer simulations are frequently useful, as are programs such as Maple and MathCad. However, it is sometimes useful to explore unfamilliar subjects. For example, a problem from several years ago involving a computer network was best solved using some advanced but learnable graph theory. The contest does take up a lot of time, and most of it is spent with other members of the team. Their efforts paid off well as six of the Duke students ranked among the top thirteen of the roughly 175 participants from 30 colleges and universities in the Southeast.