An Application of Matrices to Space Shuttle Technology
Shuttle's Robot Arm Snares Errant Satellite [Wilford 1984al; Robot Arm Knocks Troublesome Ice Off Space Shuttle [Wilf...
Editorial Process of a Bimonthly: A Case Study
We analyze the editorial processing of manuscripts for a bimonthly professional journal. Our goal is to determine the...
Fire and Ice: The Effect of Latitude and Season on Solar Collection
Recently, my student Steven Beck brought me a problem which was on the one hand highly practical, and on the other ha...
Strategy for Hiring a Secretary
An employer is seeking a new secretary. Under a rather rigid hiring procedure, the employer is allowed to interview n...
Accelerated Life Testing
Producers and consumers of products are interested in knowing how long items will function before failure. Producers ...
Practitioner's Commentary : Emergency Evacuation
The first thing I must do is make clear that I am not an emergency evacuation practitioner, but rather a researcher w...
Evacuating an Elementary School Building
Early in our mathematical modeling course, Penelope Smith, the student co-author, fulfilled her library research assi...
The Highway Slope Problem
One of the most widely used sources of problems for a mathematical modeling course is the series of modules prepared ...
The Minor Means
The Office of Publications of Local College makes the following statement: Although our College is large, its individ...
A Statistical Model for Describing the Response of Diabetic Patients to Insulin
In this paper we develop a model for the response of a diabetic patient to medical therapy. The main tools for the mo...
Modelling River Flow
From early experiences of dropping sticks into a river and watching their passage downstream, or later it becomes evi...
The Surgical Correction of Astigmatism
Following corneal transplants and cataract surgery patients are often left with considerable astigmatism. There are a...
A Beginning Calculus Project
Each year, North Lake College (Irving, Texas) offers a Mini-College at which time seniors from nearby high schools vi...
Hercules Height
The manner in which Pythagoras calculated the height of Hercules is indeed naive by today's standards, but the model ...
Huffman Codes and Data Compression
Putting messages or data into coded form usually calls to mind the cloak and dagger world of spies and secret communi...
Water Power
In recent years there has been renewed interest in finding alternative sources of energy to those provided by fossil ...
Calculus: An Infinitesimal Model for Teaching
It is a well-known fact that mathematics, particularly in the last century, has shown a definite tendency to separate...
Implementation of A Hidden Line Remover
A computer program that produces realistic pictures of opaque objects was implemented in the Lisp language. This type...
Population Growth, Tree Diagrams and Infinite Series
Many problems that the world faces today, such as hunger, pollution, resource scarcity, poverty and violence, are rel...
International Standard Book Numbers
In 1968-72 all books published throughout the world began to receive coded ten-digit numerical labels called Internat...
What's Up , Moonface?
The moon, viewed from the earth, always presents the same face; but this face is perceived as tilted at different ang...
Case Studies in Lower-Division Mathematics: A Bibliography and Related Teaching Issues
Recent articles in mathematical journals have reported the integration of industrial case studies within academic mat...
Dynamics: Throwing Javelin, Putting the Shot
Mathematical models from mechanics offer a number of advantages: they are usually easy to interpret in physical terms...
Models for Social Networks: Mathematics in Anthropology and Sociology
Until relatively recently, the development of mathematics was inextricably intertwined with the development of physic...
The Karmarkar Algorithm: New Issues in the Computational Complexity of Linear Programming
There is a great deal of excitement in the mathematical air concerning a new algorithm for linear programming. Big ci...
A Combinatorial Application of Linear Algebra
The purpose of this paper is to present an application that I have used many times while teaching an introductory cou...
Personal Decisions / Medical Decisions: Consider the Analytic Hierarchy Process
This article describes the analytic hierarchy method for personal decision making and discusses the values and pitfal...
Teaching Medical Students to Make Rational Decisions
For several years the Department of Biophysical Sciences at the State University of New York at Buffalo has given a c...
The Secret Marriage
In the manner of a large rock dropped into a tranquil pool the intellectual stir created in the 1870's by Stanley Jev...
Measuring Cardiac Output: The Refinement of a Mathematical Model
The process of building a mathematical model is normally an iterative one: the model is refined successively by makin...
Stability of Membership in Congress, 1789 Onwards
The American constitutional experience began as a great experiment. The United States was the first nation to launch ...
A UMAP Course Report
This is a report on a graduate course I taught during the summer of 1980 in which UMAP modules were the sole text. Al...
Calculator Demonstration of Numerical Stability
The proliferation of hand-held calculators gives new relevance and urgency to the plea of the late G.E. Forsythe that...
Gradient Problems in Biology
Improvement and optimization are consistent themes throughout science. Entropy increases, an object falls to earth to...
Polynomial Models of Biological Growth
Courses in calculus have routinely covered applications not only for their own sake but also in response to the stude...