Students shine at international contest

Some of USQ's brightest maths and computing and science students have made a lasting impression on the international stage, after competing in the 2007 Mathematical Contest in Modelling.

Organised by the Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications, the high profile event attracted 949 teams from 12 countries.

The USQ team, which consisted of undergraduate students Adam Blazak, Denis Sullivan and Bernard Stilgoe, were given an Honourable Mention in the annual contest.

'There were about 140 teams that were either Outstanding Winners or Meritorious Winners and around 250 that received an Honourable Mention,' USQ Senior Lecturer in Applied Mathematics and team supervisor Dr Sergey Suslov said.

'Our team received an Honourable Mention, but from the results the team made reasonable progress closer to the top of the 250 teams.

'That puts them in the top 30 per cent of those who entered the contest.'

The USQ students were the only students to enter from Australia. This was the ninth time USQ has taken part in the competition.

'I put a team in every year and the major thing is to get the students involved in the process of solving problems and working as a team,' Dr Suslov said.

'I was quite pleased with the result because the students were encouraged by their own success.'

All three students had never competed in the event before, but relished the opportunity to compete against some of the world's finest up and coming maths and computing and science students.

'Each team is given modelling problems, which have to be completed online over four days,' Climatology student and USQ team member Adam Blazak said.

'Before entering the competition none of us had taken part in it so we didn't have any expectations.

'We were going up against undergraduates from across the world and afterwards we found out that we had beaten teams form Princeton and Harvard and also some of the Chinese universities.'

This was not the first time that USQ has been given an Honourable Mention in the contest, with teams from the university also achieving the result in the past.

Media Contact: Josh Ada, USQ Media, +61 7 4631 1628