Gear up for Mathematical Contest in Modeling

Are you in love with Mathematics or is it just your favourite subject? In any case, here’s your chance to flaunt your mathematical passion to the world! Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) is a four day mathematical competition that challenges students to use mathematical tools in solving real life problems.

What is MCM?

MCM is a worldwide contest held annually during the first week of February and is sponsored by COMAP (Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications), SIAM, NSA and INFORMS. During the competition, international teams of undergraduate students are challenged to clarify, analyse, and propose solutions to open-ended problems. The contest attracts diverse students and faculty advisors from over 500 institutions around the world.

In MCM, teams of three people are given 96 hours to develop mathematical models to solve a real-world problem, evaluate their solution, and write a research paper describing the results. These papers are generally around 30 pages long. The questions are open-ended and over a broad range of topics. Past problems include fingerprint identification, submarine tracking, air traffic control, and velociraptor hunting strategies.

Why MCM?

• Practice for a thesis: The MCM will teach you a lot about organization, clarity, and time management.
• Reading papers:Reading previous research is essential to the MCM, and 96 hours of searching for critical information will develop your ability to extract useful bits quickly.
• Prototyping skills:You will learn to look at a problem and come up with a fast prototype solution. This is invaluable in programming, math, or science of any sort.
• Reputation: If you manage to win, it looks great on the resume. Several financial companies make a specific point of recruiting MCM winners.

Every year, around one thousand international teams of three undergraduates compete every year. Initially the participation in the contest was primarily from USA, but in recent years international participation has grown significantly.

Scheduled to be held during January 31 to February 4, 2013, the registration for the competition for each team should be sponsored by a faculty advisor from its institution.

Online Registration

Any team who wishes to participate in the contest must register via an online system (mentioned below) no later than 2pm EST on Thursday January 31, 2013. Registration should be done by the team's advisor.

If you are a team advisor who has already registered a team for MCM 2013 and you would like to register an additional team, go to Advisor Login and enter the email address and password that you used when you registered your first team. Once you've logged in to the system you will have an opportunity to register another team.

If you are a team advisor and you have not previously registered a team for this year's MCM (registration in previous years does not count), enter your email address in the box given here and click on the Continue Registration button.

Important: There is a $ 100 registration fee for each team to participate in MCM this year, which you will need to pay with a credit card during this online signup process. Please have your credit card ready when you begin the registration process.

For an additional $100 fee per team, you can receive a Judges Commentary written specifically about your team’s paper. (Please note this option is not required.)