IAYM in Verse

One of our students - Bhavika Sharma - has composed the following!

IAYM is "Inviting All Young Minds",
With more innovative ideas of every kind,
And lots of Einsteins to find,
But not to become bookworms and get blind.

MSF is the team for making our future,
To bring the children and give them nurture,
With lots of inventive features,
The friendly, kind, loving and intelligent teachers.

Thoughtful lectures for everyone to learn,
Creating new formulas and learning with fun,
Instead of reading and reading and making eyes burn,
Give the power not from education to turn.

Very hearty thanks,
For making children get excellent ranks,
With lots of fun and many pranks,
And making us aware nothing within us lacks.

Readme - If You Can

Public key is (25060027,24087)

Method used: RSA encryption

Private key is ????????

Encrypted code is

18475690 16353297 5743680 5743680 6994256 3100512 18872933 16277707 3807486 1030672 18872933 3798005 6994256 11970423 18872933 7063003 16353297 16277707 10737901 3798005 10837629 22028366 24228033

Encrypted text is ª@@P`eËþeõPweÛËíõ}NÁ

Decrypted text  is ????

The encryption group consists of four young minds under the guidance of Dr. Sanjeev Agrawal and Ms. Shivani Wadehra. We have studied various methods of encryption which have developed from the simple Caesar Cipher to complex methods such as blowfish, AES AND RSA encryption. We studied extensively on RSA encryption, learning about modular congruencies and theorems such as Fermat’s little theorem and Chinese remainder theorem which form the basis of RSA encryption.  We also made a code on C++ to generate random prime numbers, encryption and decryption key to encrypt and decrypt messages using this method. Finally, we have developed our own method of private key encryption using an NP-hard problem.

Apart from encryption, we have also been working on a math communication project for the topic “Applications of Trigonometry”. IAYM 2010 so far has been a great experience. Although we work from 9:30- 5:00, it seems like the day is over in just a few minutes. Apart from the amazing mentors and the guest lectures, we have met amazing students who have a similar passion in mathematics and who have helped us further appreciate its beauty and hone our knowledge.

Team members- Karanveer Mohan, Pooja Singh, Gautam Nagpal, Bhavika Sharma 

PS-Private key was 13442791

      Decrypted text- Hello, can you decrypt?

The Final Frontier

The "space science group" consists of 10 high school students from classes X to XII:

"Space, the unconquerable dimension. What lies out there has left many people amazed. The simple idea of another universe is mind boggling. We, the new generation are trying to do, what many men at NASA did years ago. Limited by our resources, we thought of making a simple, but effective “water rocket”. The basic principles that it runs on are already present everywhere around us. The Water Rocket, that we planned to make was, not your everyday backyard experiment. What we planned to do was to control the rocket’s fight path, its trajectory and its stages. A rocket, which is designed to go to outer space, has 3-4 stages; these stages break off one by one after they run out of fuel, we planned to do the same. We are students from all over India, who have teamed up with our mentor Mr. Jatin Anand sir and vowed to build a rocket that would do what we all desired- reach the final frontier.

We started off small; on paper we drew basic guidelines to build us a rocket. Every one of us contributed to the designing of the rocket. Ideas poured in from every direction, and soon our creation was complete, well on paper at least. We were guided carefully, by our mentor, and soon we had a finalized design and parts ready at hand. The two groups that we were divided into were evenly balanced, so we had no problem in communication. As we started building our rocket we felt how different it is to do one thing in paper, and in practical. I really hope when we are done, we have a working 2-stage rocket. After all that testing and drawing, we also had a few laughs. Mathematics was also implemented everywhere. We learnt how to handle the data given to us, find the trajectory and have fun."

Abhishek Oswal, Anant Singh, Chandramani Verma, Deeksha Agrawal, Jeevan Singh Nayal, Kunal Maini, Pranav Obhrai, Raj Anmol Singh Garg, Sheena Arora, Vardaan Choudhari.

Virus-AntiVirus

“Silent Assassins - as the name suggests, are silently trying to assassinate PC’s by pursuing the Virus-Anti-Virus project. This uphill task has been undertaken by our team under the guidance of our mentor Mr Niteesh Sahni and with the dedicated support of Mr. Rahul, and is being carried out in assembly language. After grasping certain basic concepts of assembly language, we have started developing “Overwritten Virus”, which is one of the categories of viruses. We are doing this, so as to get a snapshot of how a virus actually searches for its host and infects by replicating itself.

Further, after getting the basic understanding of viruses, we will try to develop viruses with more complexities like companion viruses, parasitic viruses as well as source code viruses.MSF is simply awesome!! Along with the superb task of developing viruses, here we enjoy learning mathematics in a quite innovative manner. We wholeheartedly thank MSF for providing us a platform to enhance our skills by organising IAYM-2010. MSF ROCKS!!!"

Ankit Kumar, Biplob Biswas, Manika Bindal, Nandini Deka, Neha Singh, Reyaz Ahmed Siddiqui, Rishabh Bhasin, Ritwik Rath, Saurabh Kumar Saha, Shreyas Kapoor, Subh Vardhan.

IAYM on YouTube

Links to IAYM clips on YouTube:

• Slide show of images from the first days.
  
  
  
• Videos of the inauguration.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Face Detection... the experience so far

"95% match….These are the words that the computer displayed in bold letters after we ran our first test. We have a crew of six members, who have been working on the project “FACE DETECTION”. The scope for the project is enormous. Although we have implemented some features of our own in the project like face isolation using probability, rgb and ycbcr colour modes, these ideas are yet to be perfected in practice.

To start with, we took a database of over 150 individuals each having 20 images and constructed image vectors from the matrices obtained. These image vectors consisted of 36000 pixels each and hence formed a subspace of R36000. An orthonormal basis of this subspace was found using the PCA(Principal Component Analysis) and SVD(Singular Value Decomposition Theorem). These vectors were arranged in order of their contribution to the database images. These were called the eigenfaces. It was further found that majority of the features of the face depended upon the initial few eigenfaces.

The test images were reconstructed using these eigenfaces. We also used K-means clustering to group various images of the same person in the database. However some of our endeavors failed during execution some of which were- Edge Detection, Hausdorff Distance Measurement, Circular Object Detection, Binary Image Method."

- Akshay Agrawal, Mukesh Kumar Tripathi, Parth Singh, Pooja Narula, Shashwat Goel, Vibhor Kalra

A Matter of Perspective

In this morning's lecture I asked the students to draw an approaching train - this is a favourite of mine when I need a break from the usual topics and it leads to nice discussions of perspective and geometry. Today's session went rather smoothly. In the past I have had students just stare blankly at their sheet of paper and refuse to draw!

But that's just my perception. Hopefully, this blog will start featuring students' voices too. We are collecting their comments to put up. In the meanwhile, check out Nitin Agrawal's blog. (Any other students with blogs? Let us know.)

The Bamboo Team

Along with the IAYM students, there is a group of students working on a special project - developing innovative uses of bamboo in educational aids and other devices. This is part of a yearlong project funded by the National Mission on Bamboo Applications, and being executed by MSF with the aid of designers and artisans who specialize in bamboo based designs.

	During June 2-3, we were visited by Ms Rebecca Reubens, Managing Director of RHIZOME. Rebecca is a designer with a particular interest in the use of bamboo towards promoting environmentally sustainable and socially just practices.
	In a workshop with Rebecca, two students jot down their pet likes and dislikes about their educational experiences.This was the first step towards formulating the goals of the project.
	The list grows longer.
	At the end of the session, the students have arrived at a list of principles they would like to demonstrate through bamboo-based devices, as well as the key properties these should have.

Three Musketeers...

Students in the TAFS hostel.

IAYM 2010 Day 1

	Students at the opening session in the Audio-Visual room of The Air Force School.
	Prof. Dinesh Singh, Director, MSF.
	The Space Science group with Jatin Anand.
	The Virus group with Rahul Kumar.

IAYM 2010 Day 1 - Part 2

	The Mathematical Biology group with Charu Sharma.
	The Alternate Energy group with Professors L M Saha and Shobha Bagai.
	The Face Detection group with Satish Pandey.
	TAFS campus. A retired Hawker Hunter of the Indian Air Force.
	TAFS campus.

IAYM - a year ago

IAYM 2010 starts tomorrow! Let's look back to a description of the final days of IAYM 2009 by Ajaz Ahmed:


The much-awaited presentations ceremony started on June 26th. The students' hard work and their invaluable ideas started to show up. The presentations were so divided, that they could be spread out two days: 26th and 27th of June. There were 11 groups. Every group had prepared one presentation on their main project and one on their Maths Communication.

So every group has to submit two presentations and two reports for the same mentioned earlier. Though many groups prepared their presentations and reports at a late stage, but still they managed to respond nicely. Their on-stage performance was perfect.

The presentations which took place that day included the groups: Chandrayaan 1, Chandrayaan 2 (College Groups), Encryption(College), Encryption(School), Error Correction(School), Jantar Mantar, Search Engine( Eagle 2).

Each group mentioned above came up with a different concept to be explained in their Maths Communication. They used MATLAB, MATHEMATICA, FLASH, MUPAD etc. in their presentations impressively, which is quite difficult to those students, who did not even know about these software a month earlier. The students were simply brilliant and amazing in their approach towards the subject. Some came up with a story, some came up with a game, some came up with a quiz and so on in their Maths Comm. project to explain different concepts. This shows how Mathematics is linked with everyone and everything in this world.

The day overall was a fantastic one. The whole day many students and some of the faculty clicked as many pictures as they could, as everyone of us knew that, how precious that moment and occasion was. Each one wanted to store these moments for their future.

I think around 2000 or more pictures were clicked on the same day. The programme left the students with cheer in their heart, and at the same time, a fear of leaving their friends on the last day. The students energy level showed their excitement. This can also be felt by the faces of students-cum-faculty members who were clicking snaps, capturing videos etc.

The day was very special to me, in particular, because I turned 20, the same day... Though I wanted to go home early, that day, still I was very happy to be a part of the occasion that day. I made a lot of friends and this memories which I gathered here will cherish me, in my future life.

The Final Day was not over.. it was the second last one...
So, let us move to the final day, Thanks!!!

Check out the pics here.

Ajaz Ahmed

RIP: the pied piper of mathematics

Martin Gardner is no more. Read about him here. Then give yourself a treat and read his books!

Get in line

Shivani Wadehra will be leading the group working on Queuing Theory. She has a master's degree in Operations Research from the University of Delhi.

"Queues are formed at movie halls, metro stations, traffic lights, etc. We would like to optimise these queues so that waiting times are as low as possible, or the number of servers is economically efficient. Longer waiting times lead to costs such as loss of productive time, higher fuel consumption, etc. For example, in Hong Kong, it was computed that a 10 minute delay each day for every worker would lead to a loss of output of about US $2.28 billion a year."

"How do we study the impact of different factors on a queue? One way to get insight is to simulate random arrivals and departures on a computer - this involves basic probability combined with "random numbers" (Ever noticed the RAND button on your scientific calculator?). The diagram shows a simulation of the changing length of a queue where arrivals are random but on average are once every 10 minutes. The service time is similarly random, but on average is one customer every 5 minutes. Note that even though the service time is - on average - quite short, the queue can still get quite long!"

Trading in pairs

This contribution is from Tanmoy Neog, who recently completed his masters in Financial Mathematics from the University of Warwick.

"We see that the two stock price series in the first diagram display a lot of co-movement. Can we take advantage of the co-movement of stocks to build a trading strategy? In fact we can. By taking appropriate amounts of the two stocks we obtain the second diagram."

"We observe that we can now sell one stock and buy another simultaneously at certain time intervals to register a profit. This strategy is based on the premise that certain portfolios of stocks have a long run equilibrium value. Due to speculative trading on individual stocks there is a deviation from this value. We take advantage of this fact!!"

"These stocks are in fact Infosys and Wipro on the Bombay Stock Exchange!!"

The job of mathematics is to create ways of identifying such co-movement and the appropriate combinations which will allow this strategy to work...

Maths in Biology

Charu Sharma, senior lecturer at MSF, carried out this analysis of genetic data from 78 individuals. Some simple applications of matrices and statistics show that the individuals belong to 3 distinct groups (in fact these individuals are grouped geographically - they are from the Middle East, China and Brazil). In IAYM we will explore whether such techniques can also distinguish the healthy from those in the early stages of a disease!

Charu has a masters in Applied Mathematics from the University of Houston, and is currently collaborating with faculty of the Institute for Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), a premier CSIR institute, towards developing mathematical tools and software for use in biology.

Up, up, and ...

As our faculty put the finishing touches on the preparations, some are having more fun than others. Here we see Jatin Anand, in charge of the Space Science project, launching a water rocket he has constructed from the barest of materials. Start thinking on how to improve it!


Jatin has a masters in Mathematics from University of Delhi. As is visible here, he particularly enjoys creating tools and models for use in education.

IAYM 2010 is at The Air Force School

This year's venue is The Air Force School (TAFS), Subroto Park, New Delhi. Outstation participants will be accommodated in the TAFS hostel.

See the Google map below:


View Larger Map

IAYM 2010 - Ready for Launch

The second edition of IAYM is due to start on June 1, 2010. We are currently finalizing the list of selected students - a heavy task since there were over 1500 applications for about 60 seats! The selections will be announced by 5 pm Monday, May 10.