Cadets Take First Place Second Straight Year

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.USMA math majors CDT Matthew Yuan ’19, Abby Vorhaus ’18, Kameron Grubaugh, Zachary Riggenbach, Zachary Zimmerman, and Samuel Crump competed in the eighth annual Cumberland Valley Math Modeling Challenge held at Shippensburg University from 24 to 25 September. For the second straight year, CDTs Zachary Riggenbach, Zachary Zimmerman, and Samuel Crump took 1st Place besting ten other teams from four different universities. This year’s competition challenged teams to formulate a mathematical model and prepare a presentation that addresses the economic impact of legalizing marijuana, an extremely pertinent and polarizing issue in today’s political landscape. Teams received scores based on the validity and feasibility of their assumptions, the completeness of their model, and their ability to communicate and defend their approach. Cadet Zimmerman remarked, "The modeling competition allowed me to apply macroeconomic concepts to a mathematical challenge. This interdisciplinary experience served to break down the barriers between academic subjects in order to contextualize a real-world issue," while CDT Crump offered, "the CVMMC is one of the few opportunities cadets have to apply the knowledge they gained inside a classroom to a real world situation. After comparing our results to results of experts in the field of the problem, we are all pretty surprised as to how close we are to their results."