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. will receive $2,000 for "The Mathter." Strogatz wrote that the movie was "fun, dramatic, fast, passionate, snarky," which he found made it the "most compelling of the films."
The judges determined two third-prize winners, Emily Griffith from Luckey, Ohio, for "Graphing Flowers," and the group VHHS Vid-Teamers from Vestavia Hills, Ala., for their film "Mathelicious!" Each will receive a $1,000 prize.
Two honorable mentions J. Parker Garrison from Indian Trail, N.C., for "Math...Powers the Internet," and Maddy Stewart and Bailey Bermond from Evergreen, Colo., for "Trig in a Tree" will each receive $250.
Math-O-Vision promoted competition by marketing the contest through professional mathematics organizations and Facebook and Twitter.
Although Rockmore would have been "jazzed" at the idea of having entire classes of student submissions, there were never clusters of entries from the same place.
The Neukom Insititute created the Math-O-Vision contest as an outreach effort to promote computational science.
"The computational connection is that movie-making has been transformed by computation," Rockmore said. "You can take out your phone and make a movie. That technology is based on all sorts of mathematics."
Rockmore said the competition was designed for high school students, who are old enough to create a meaningful product but young enough to be inspired by the project.
"Both scientists and artists learn a lot from collaborating on projects, and at the end of the day, we hoped that this competition would give that kind of experience," Rockmore said.