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Beginning last November, high school students across the United States began searching for ways in which the world is shaped by mathematics.
High schoolers were encouraged to submit 4-minute movies of their findings to Math-O-Vision, an applied mathematics and animation contest sponsored by the mathematics department and the Neukom Institute for Computational Science.
Math-O-Vision received 45 submissions by the May 1 deadline in its first round of entries this year, said Dan Rockmore, who is the Neukom director, Math-O-Vision founder and mathematics department chair.
One of the goals of Math-O-Vision is to promote interdisciplinary education by integrating math and the visual art of movie-making.
"When arty kinds of people get involved in science-related processes, and when scientists have to bring their ideas to visual form, both sides learn a lot," Rockmore said.
The contest submissions were evaluated by five judges, including actor and director Alan Alda, Disney and Dreamworks animator Tom Sito and Cornell University applied mathematics professor Steven Strogatz.Rockmore and computer science professor Lorie Loeb represented Dartmouth on the panel.
The movie submissions were judged on three criteria: originality and creativity, relevance to mathematics and public voting.
In the first round, the movies were posted to the Math-O-Vision website for a public vote and were ranked by popularity.
The second round involved a combination of the judges' scores for creativity and math content.
The contest winners were announced on Wednesday and will receive cash prizes.
In first place, Austin Eng and Katherine Lin from Freehold, N.J., will receive a $4,000 for their movie, "Integration of Math and Life." On the Math-O-Vision website, Strogatz said that the movie "did the best job of showing the pervasiveness of math in real life" and was "extremely professional and effective."
In second place, Tim Schauer from Charlottesville, Va.
