The University of Texas at Dallas
close menu

Mathematics Competitions

Mathematical Contest in Modeling.

In 2016 and 2017, UTD participated in the prestigious Mathematical Contest in Modeling. This contest is open to undergraduate and high school students worldwide, and challenges students to analyze and propose solutions to open-ended modeling problems.

Each team is given 96 hours to develop a mathematical model to solve a real-world problem and write a 20-page paper describing their findings and results. The questions are open-ended and cover a broad range of topics. Past problems include predicting Ebola, searching for a lost plane, and controlling traffic flows.

In January 2017, six teams from the Department of Mathematical Sciences participated. The coaches were Dr. Yifei Lou and Dr. Tomoki Ohsawa. The results were as follows:

Honorable Mention: Jeanie Aird, Brendan Caseria, and Danny Desautels;

Other successful participants:
(a) Tra Ngo, Ryan Duan, Russell Hart; (b) Luke Bang, Hugo Espiritu, Shiva Sharma; (c) Armin Khamoshi, Artem Bolshakov, Zane Olds; (d) Mugdha Gupta, Amol Mavuduru, Abinash Bhattarai.

One of the groups is interested in working with the faculty advisor to continue their project and submit their work to a journal for publication.

In January 2016 three students from our department entered the MCM for the first time. Our department’s successful participants were Artem Bolshakov, Armin Khamoshi, and Andrew Merrill.

Putnam Competition:

In 2016, the UTD team consisting of three students (Brendan Caseria, Artem Bolshakov and Zachary Hancock) ranked 30th out of 568 teams from colleges and universities in Canada and the United States. We also had individual competitors with very high rankings: Brendan Caseria Otto Osterman were ranked in the top 500 competitors.

In 2015, the UTD team consisting of three students (Artem Bolshakov, Brendan Caseria and Andrew Merrill) ranked 18th out of 554 teams from colleges and universities in Canada and the United States. We also had individual competitors with very high rankings out of the 4275 participating students: Georgiy Klimenko was in ranked in the top 200 competitors, and Artem Bolshakov and Brendan Caseria were ranked in the top 500 competitors. This was the best performance ever for UTD.

Putnam News Story

Texas Calculus Bowl:

On March 30th 2017, the UTD Math team ws ranked 2nd out of 28 teams at the “Calculus bowl contest” during the 97th annual meeting of the Texas section of the MAA. The team members were Brendan Caseria, Russel Hart, Bereon Burns-Zimmerman, Vaughn Osterman, and Artem Bolshakov, with Dr. Maxim Arnold as the coach.

On March 31, 2016, a DMS UTD team consisting of five students Artem Bolshakov, Brendan Caseria, Asim Gazi, Iakov Rachinskiy and Caleb Spence, and with Dr. Maxim Arnold as the coach, participated for the first time in Calculus Bowl contest organized by Mathematical Association of America at S. F. Austin University. This year 32 teams participated, and the UTD team won first place.