COMAP Training Materials
Below is a list of links I am compiling for your training. I have divided them into two types:
General Materials: This includes strategy materials for how to do well in the contest and lists of past problems from the contest.
Specific Materials: These include good quick references to specific types of models.
| General Materials | |
| Materials/Link | Description |
| Kelly Cline's "Secrets of the Mathematical Contest in Modeling": http://www.carroll.edu/~kcline/mcm.pdf | In this excellent overview of the MCM/ICM Kelly Cline gives great strategies for achieving success during the COMAP weekend. This overview also includes descriptions of basic "roles" for the team members. |
| A list of past MCM/ICM problems: http://www.carroll.edu/~mparker/mcm/mcmproblems.htm | Here Mark Parker has compiled a list that gives all COMAP MCM/ICM problems posed in the past. |
| Dr. Mark Parker's page with a brief desciption of the contest and MCM/ICM resources: http://www.carroll.edu/~mparker/mcm.html | Check out the resources on this page especially the keywords for library or web searches for both continuous and discrete problems. |
| Official rules of the contest: http://www.comap.com/undergraduate/contests/ | These are the rules your team must follow. |
| Specific Materials |
| Materials/Link |
| Mathematical Modeling of Infectious Diseases: "Epidemic Models for SARS and Measles" by Edward Rozema, in in The College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 38, No. 4, Sept. 2007, p 246 - 259. A nice introduction to infectious disease modeling. Only requires a Calc 2 background. Also here is a basic tutorial on the logistic growth mode with MATLAB code and/or an excel spreadsheet for helping you fit the model to data. The logistic growth model is a nonlinear differential equation. .... "This section will show how we can fit the data using either an Excel spreadsheet with ..." http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~jmahaffy/courses/f01/math636/lectures/competition2/competition2.html
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Queuing Theory Resources: http://ite.pubs.informs.org/Vol2No3/Ashley/ - nice Excel spreadsheet tutorial for a simple easy to read introduction to basic queuing theory concepts including M/M/s queues (written by a business prof I believe)..should reference in paper if you use it. Here is a pdf copy of the paper to reference http://mia.ece.uic.edu/~papers/etc/pdf00001.pdf Our library has this textbook: Fundamentals of Queuing Theory by Gross and Harris (from George Mason University!) Call number: T57.9 .G76 1998 http://mason.gmu.edu/~dgross1/gross-harris/gh3.html You can download the freely available QTS (Queuing Theory Software - based on above text - it is an Excel spreadsheet) at this link: http://www.geocities.com/qtsplus/index.html The software implements many basic queuing models. "Gary shows you a simple implementation of the "Airline Check-In" queue that ... Our Airline Check-in desk / Blocking Queue model is approximated quite well"...the code is contained in a zip file - could be useful if you want to implement your own code: http://dotnetjunkies.com/Article/D7E688B8-0BDD-4D44-9A0F-4CD26FB35F51.dcik |