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UCSD Honors High School Statistics Competition
Winners
By Sherry Seethaler | March 19, 2007
The winners of the first annual greater San Diego
High School Honors Statistics Contest were recognized
for their achievements on Thursday at UCSD at an awards
dinner following the Kyoto Prize lecture.
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| Jamey Jester of Francis Parker School (left), and
Ben Cosman of La Jolla High School (right)
with Hirotugu Akaike, 2006 Kyoto Prize Laureate
in the Basic Sciences. |
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Forty-six students from nine high schools took part
in the March 3 competition, which was organized by
mathematicians at UCSD, in collaboration with the
Greater San Diego Math Council. The organizers say
that their goal is to recognize and support the efforts
of local high school students and their teachers and
to stimulate excellence in the study of statistics
and probability.
“We hope to set a bar that students will strive
to reach,” said Bruce Arnold, director of UCSD’s
Math Testing and Placement Office. “Students
of all abilities participate in these competitions. They
do it because they enjoy being challenged. The competition
provides a venue to compete and validates their efforts.”
The top two students, Jamey Jester of Francis Parker
School, and Ben Cosman of La Jolla High School each
received a $500 prize. Cosman's mother is Pamela Cosman,
a professor of electrical and computer engineering
and director of the Center for Wireless Communications
in the Jacob's School of Engineering. The awards were
presented by Sheela Talwalker, president of the Sand
Diego Chapter of the American Statistical Association.
She promised the students that if they continued their
studies in statistics beyond high school, they would
certainly develop an affection for the discipline.
“Statistics is not just helping scientists
in every field deal with the 21st century explosion
of data,” said Talwalker. “Statistics
is important in our day-to-day life because statistical
thinking helps you make decisions in the presence
of uncertainty. And uncertainty is the most certain
thing in life, other than death and taxes.”
The competition involved two exams, one multiple
choice and one written, that required students to
solve mathematics problems using intuition and creativity.
The exams covered the probability and statistics content
from the California Mathematics Standards and the
College Board Advanced Placement program. Each school
entered a team of 3-8 members. The top three individual
scores determined the overall team score.
At the awards dinner, selected students presented
their solutions to the written portion of the examination.
The first student presenter, Michael Shen from Rancho
Bernardo High School, quickly dispelled the myth that
mathematicians lack a sense of humor. He gave the
audience a tongue-in-cheek discussion of his reasoning
about the problem, which involved interpreting the
value of r squared—a measurement of the strength
of the relationship between two variables—for
a graph called a regression line.
“I believe there is a moral to every math problem,”
he concluded. “The moral to this one is
that everyone is like a regression line. Some have
naturally high r-squared values and some have naturally
low r-squared values. We need to strive to achieve
the highest r-squared values.”
The top five students and the coaches of the top
three schools, La Jolla High School, Ramona High School
and Rancho Bernardo High School, were awarded graphing
calculators donated by Texas Instruments. The top
ten students each received a marble paperweight engraved
with their name and each school received a certificate
of participation.
Students from a 10th school had planned on participating
in the contest. They met at 5:30 am on March 3 in
a parking lot in Tijuana to make the trip across the
border to the event, but their bus failed to start. Happily,
they were able join their peers at the Kyoto Prize
lecture and awards dinner.
At the Kyoto Prize lecture, Hirotugu Akaike, the
2006 Kyoto Prize Laureate in the Basic Sciences, discussed
the powerful statistical tool he developed, now known
as the Akaike Information Criterion. AIC makes it
possible to identify relationships in large volumes
of data and has applications in virtually every field
of science and engineering. Akaike advised students
to pick one problem and assured them that with “un,
don, kon”—luck, persistence and patience—they
would succeed. |
