The $45 prize was a nice bonus, but Bill Owens ’02 and his fellow Macalester math majors do it because it’s fun .

With their teammates and classmates, seniors Bill Owens and Andy Cantrell have done significant work in math competitions and research during their four years at Macalester.

Bill Owens has been enormously successful in math competitions during his time at Macalester. Math competition exams vary in length from a few hours to several days, and usually test technical competence and ingenuity in a variety of math disciplines. Often, students will be asked to cut across disciplines to find solutions.

Owens names the Konhauser Problem Fest as his favorite of the various exams in which he has participated because of the relatively short amount of time it takes to complete:three hours for ten problems.

Owens and his regular teammates, Emilia Simeonova ’02 and Alex Burst ’02 participated this year in the annual math competition between with teams from Macalester, St. Thomas, Carleton, St. Olaf, and Gustavus Adolphus College. Owens’ team placed third of 20 teams, earning Macalester third place in the competition.

The Konhauser is also a favorite because of the cash prizes - Owens’ three-person Macalester team split a forty-five dollar prize for their third-place finish.

The team also participated in the North Central Section/Mathematics Association of America team competition. Owens, Simeonova and Burst placed sixth of 64 teams representing 21 schools from Minnesota, Canada and the Dakotas. Nine other Macalester students also took part in this event.

Each teammate brings significant talents to the group, Owens said. While Owens is often the writer of the group, Simeonova brings strong geometry skills and Burst excels at “poking holes in everyone’s arguments.”

When asked why he has chosen to study math at Macalester, Owens describes his choice as “the path of least resistance,” - a phrase which, coincidentally, is also the topic of his honors project with Professor Tom Halverson. While he’s always been talented in the subject, Owens says he also chose math because “contrary to the humanities where an issue can be argued back and forth for hours without reaching a conclusion, math is a field where there is always a right answer.” After graduation, Owens plans to stay in the Twin Cities and work in software development.

Andy Cantrell, a native of Fort Collins, Colorado, is another talented senior of in the math department. Along with Owens, Burst, Ghaith Hiary ’02, Alex Burst and others, Cantrell has placed highly in the Putnam Exam, a prestigious national math competition. Cantrell, Erik Slivken and Nicolas Lindgren also placed eleventh as a team in the Konhauser Problem Fest.

“Students of that caliber make teaching at Macalester a lot of fun,” Professor David Bressoud said, speaking of all of the talented senior math students.

According to Cantrell, the problems that really interest him are those that can take months, or even years, to solve. His focus, algebraic communatorics, is a field in which one examines the correspondence between abstract structures and their physical interpretations in an in-depth manner. While pure math is often defined as math done without any reference to observational science, algebraic communatorics operates on the basis that pure math and science are “inextricably tied together.” Cantrell’s honors thesis on character theory, a project with Professor Tom Halverson, fellow senior Brian Miller, and Professor Arun Ram of the University of Wisconsin, will be published in a the Journal of Communatorial Theory, a professional academic publication.

For Cantrell, the joy in math is to push abstract structures towards more pure and elegant forms. Thus, he describes his interests in mathematics as primarily “aesthetic.” The Macalester math department, he says, is an “aesthetically focused group of people-it is a department that cares about making beautiful math.”

Last year, Cantrell followed his other aesthetic interests to Rochester Technical College to study ceramics for a year. Cantrell says that the Macalester math department was “extremely supportive” of his decision. While studying art and mathematics do not directly apply to the other, Cantrell believes that each of his interests feed each other, and push him to do better work in both.

Cantrell plans to pursue a split career between art and math, continuing to show at galleries while attending graduate school at either the University of Wisconsin at Madison or Yale.