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Photo by Eric Engman

A team of whiz kids at the University of Alaska Fairbanks proved they don’t need an Ivy League school to do stellar mathematics.

Computer science major Seth Chadwick, math major Rachel Krieg and physics/computer science/math triple-major Christopher Granade earned the highest honor in a worldwide applied mathematics competition that includes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford and Harvard, among other major schools.

“It’s actually an old joke that UAF is called the ‘Harvard of the North,’ but we think it came from a group of students who beat out Harvard a few years ago in this competition,” Granade said.

The Mathematical Contest in Modeling is an international mail-based contest sponsored by the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (COMAP), a nonprofit organization whose goal is to improve mathematics education. The contest involves applied simulation and requires students to incorporate a number of math and technology solutions. The UAF team was recognized as the COMAP Most Outstanding Team.

UAF has a long history of winning the competition. UAF’s team was founded in the early 1990s by Chris Hartman and Orion Lawlor, who have remained at the school and now serve as faculty advisers.

This year’s contestants were given a choice of two problems: One involved calculating receding coastlines and the other involved sudoku puzzles.

More than a thousand different teams from around the world tried to answer the question about sudoku.

Orion Lawlor served as the team’s adviser and was responsible for picking the teams.

“It wasn’t about finding the smartest kids, but more about getting people with different skill sets and ideas,” Lawlor said.

Seth Chadwick is an experienced computer programmer and had previously constructed software to generate sudoku puzzles for his mother.

Rachel Krieg brought her math skills to the group and analyzed the statistics about puzzles’ difficulty levels. And Granade was able to integrate all the elements into a written solution.

“We just knew how to attack this one,” Granade said.

They spent the first six hours brainstorming, then got to work on the white board and tried to figure out what exactly makes a sudoku problem difficult.

“We figured out the hardest part of a sudoku problem is the number of possible answers,” Lawlor said.

The students had to come up with a puzzle of a certain difficulty and then come up with all the possible answers to solve it.

“We just bought some sudoku books at Fred Meyer and tested the puzzles, then we tried to digitize them,” he said.

While the team worked, Lawlor kept them fed and tried to keep the computers from crashing.

The team was then required to publish their solution, which required a 62-page paper to fully explain.

The paper was also recognized as the prize winner by the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences.

“During the competition, our typical day would involve waking up, showering and getting right to work,” Granade said.

The team made a conscious decision to get six hours of sleep each night so their work would be strong.

But even at night Granade remembers dreaming of the math problem.

“It was a very grueling experience, spending 96 hours in a poorly ventilated room living and breathing this contest, but I don’t regret it for a minute,” Granade said.

Their solution will be published in the Fall 2008 COMAP Journal.