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:


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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.