FSC Team Nails Math Competition
November 25, 2019
In a story reminiscent of David and Goliath, three Applied Mathematics majors at FSC recently beat four teams from NYU – declared by US News to offer the #1 Applied Math program in the country – at the international SCUDEM IV competition. Three other colleges also went down to defeat.
“What is really impressive,” says Dr. Carlos Marques, chair of the Mathematics Department, “is that NYU fielded four teams, and NYU is ranked number one in the country for Applied Mathematics. Moreover, a major area of their research is exactly on applications of differential equations. So, it is fair to say that our team competed against the best in the field, and on top of that, our students had only about a week to prepare for this competition, and one of them has not even taken a course in differential equations!”
Members of the FSC team were Anthony Ercolano, Anthony Porras, and Henry Zaradich. Ercolano and Zaradich were hand-picked by Dr. Marques, who for the past two years has been giving them extra work to help them excel.
“We want to help our students go beyond the curriculum,” he says.
“All the teams at the competition knew the techniques of solving differential equations and performing numerical analysis, but the greatest challenge was taking the problem and translating it into the language of mathematics to apply those techniques” says Ercolano. “This is the most important part of creating any real-world model, and the part for which the department has given us ample training. So in my opinion this is what gave us the edge over all the other teams and allowed us to take first place.”
Porras was added to the team by Dr. Alex Kodess, assistant professor, who then became their coach. The trio had only a week to write their paper and organize a presentation – making their victory all the more impressive. The paper – “Chemical Espionage” – deals with wasps, butterflies, pheromones, and butterfly eggs.
Says Dr. Marques: “They need to speak in our seminar and explain the connection between all of these elements!”
