Consortium 99, Fall/Winter 2010
Table of Contents: From the Editor's Desk: The Common Core State Standards In Search of Research: Assessing Assess...
Modeling the Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtle Population
This pullout focuses on modeling the rise and fall of the population of Kemp's ridley sea turtles, the smallest and m...
Mathematics and Sports
Has the sports program in your school district been canceled-the victim of a taxpayer revolt against passing your loc...
Engineering World Health
At cashstrapped
hospitals in
Nicaragua,
Ecuador, and
Tanzania, blood pressure gauges,
oxygen compressors, a...
The Cant of Computer Literacy
Cant is an old English word for insincere or meaningless talk used merely from convention or habit. Originally it ref...
Number Theory
Elementary number theory is the study of the relationships among the integers. These relationships arise from two pro...
Analytic Number Theory and the Zeta Function
Number theory is an area of mathematics in which the properties of the positive integers become the focal point of st...
Discrete Mathematics
That revived pedagogical entity called discrete mathematics appears surrounded by a mist of uncertainty and some conf...
Retraining in Computer Science : Small is Beautiful
Nearly everyone in college teaching is aware of the tremendous increase in the demand for computer-related courses, a...
Pure and Applied Mathematics from an Industrial Perspective
The primary purpose of this article is to comment on the difference between pure and applied mathematics from the poi...
The Language of Growth , Enlargement , and Decrease
Poor or imprecise use of language can often confuse a reader or listener. There is particular occasion for such confu...
Elliptic Curves
The topic of elliptic curves is an exciting one for a variety of reasons. For one thing, elliptic curves are a meetin...
Executive Mathematics
The red ink informed Jim Washam that he had made a $400 mathematical error. Washam, a bank vice-president, was glad t...
Adaptive Methods
Adaptive methods have their foundation in the mathematical field of control theory. The basic idea of an adaptive met...
Applied Mathematics in China
Last fall a delegation of U.S. college mathematics educators visited a dozen Chinese universities at the invitation o...
Hercules and the Hydra
Hermles, the greatest hero of Greek mythology, was the strongest man on earth and supremely self-confident in his str...
Game Theory and Nuclear Deterrence
The theory of nuclear deterrence seems, at first glance, crudely simple. Since both the United States and the Soviet ...
The Lifeguard Problem
The following exercise appears in some version in almost every calculus textbook (e.g., [Fraleigh 1985, 1851; [Purcel...
Difference Equations in Genetics
The evolution of many allele frequencies can be understood through the use of difference equations. Let n represent (...
Parabolic Wave Equations
The last fifteen years or so have seen enormous research activity in the development of parabolic wave equations (PWE...
Algebraic Geometry in CAD / CAM: The Role of 19th Century Mathematics in Geometric Modeling
Geometric modeling is the representation and manipulation of geometic data in a computer. It is the mathematics that ...
The Curious History of Trigonometry
Current trigonometry texts begin with trigonometric ratios, continue through the solution of right and other triangle...
Genetic Algorithms in Optimization
Genetic algorithms (GAS) are iterative processes for finding good solutions to optimization problems. GAS operate on ...
Mr. Markov Plays Chutes and Ladders
Readers with children (or readers who were themselves once children) may be farnilar with the simple board game of Ch...
A Tour of Graphical Typesetting on the Macintosh
This article began as a comparative review of Macintosh programs for producing publication-quality graphics, inspired...
Optimal Blackjack Strategy with 'Lucky Bucks'
In the casino game blackjack or 21, mathematically determined best plays have been calculated by various mathematicia...
Mathematical Developments in 1992
Mathematical research in 1992 revealed a surprising connection between a newly discovered means of checking proofs an...
Timing the Blind Watchmaker: Comments on an Evolution Model of Richard Dawkins
In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins [1986al argues for the feasibility of evolution using a simple stoc...
Municipal Recycling: Location and Optimality
Recycling is difficult for local governments because it is a multidimensional problem. Not only are there biological,...
Commentary on Rotations in 3-Space
The problem of computing rotations in three-dimensional Euclidean space has been widely studied. It arises in many ar...
Tank Calibration: Practical Examples in Approximation Techniques
The topic of tank calibration provides an ideal setting for introducing important ideas in computational mathematics....
Professors' Commentary: The Politics of Course Time Slots
When one of the authors (Campbell) was a graduate student at Cornell in the late 1960s, he never ceased to be amazed ...
The Dynamical Systems Health Center: A Mathematical Model of a Diet and Exercise Program
This paper began as a class assignment for Prof. James Sandefur's Discrete Dynamical Systems course at Georgetown Uni...
Practitioner's Commentary: Diet Models
Author Cherry presents in this issue of The UMAP Iournal a mathematical model of the effects of diet and exercise on ...
A Case Study in Scheduling Courses
A frequent problem that college students face is that of scheduling their courses. Part of the problem stems from req...