How do I submit my team's solution?

Click on the How to Submit a Solution tab at left for detailed instructions on how to submit a solution. You will need to register before you can submit. Please go to the Team Registration tab to register. Once you are registered you will have a login. After logging in you can create a solution file by attaching either a pdf, Word, or OpenAccess file.

How does it work?

1. An organization poses a problem.
2. eBourbaki posts the problem online.
3. Students form teams and submit solutions.
4. An evaluation committee meets to determine a winner.
5. Winners receive prizes.
6. eBourbaki works with the organization to implement the winning solution.

Why sponsor a problem?

There are two main reasons organizations work with us to pose problems. The first is a dedication to improving math education through a unique avenue of making explicit the connection between real-world problems and mathematics. The second is a desire for innovation. Innovation can mean a new way of looking at a problem. It can also mean finding innovative people. Our contests provide a very good measure of the kind of creative thinking and teamwork skills that many organizations are looking for in new recruits.

Why submit a solution?

Mathematical modeling skills are increasingly valuable in every avenue of life; eBourbaki contests provide an opportunity to try out interesting problems, improve mathematical intuition and model-building techniques, and have fun with friends on a joint project. Then of course there's the prize money and the possibility of presenting your solution to an organization that will actually use it. This isn't homework -- it's real!

eBourbaki grows out of a structuralist ethic; namely, we believe that mathematical structures are eminently useful in understanding, analyzing, and predicting phenomena in real-world realms from finance to science to politics. We are named after a collaborative of French mathematicians that began in the 1930s who called themselves ‘Bourbaki’ and published under a common name. Nicolas Bourbaki, as the collective author came to be known, was very influential in the mathematics community and revised the foundations of modern mathematics beginning from first principles in order to create a curriculum to revitalize French mathematics after the First World War.

Mathematical modeling is coming of age. Modern computational advances have made possible the ubiquity of mathematical models of all varieties in science, industry, and business. The greater intellectual aim of eBourbaki is to extend the notion of structuralism to real-world modeling by encouraging models that exploit mathematical structures to their fullest.

eBourbaki is also deeply concerned with the state of mathematics education for which the Bourbaki movement is in part to blame. Arguably, Bourbaki’s greatest failure in axiomatizing mathematics was to abstract away all intuition from the real-world, and in doing so to completely sever ‘pure’ mathematics from questions arising from outside the strict boundaries of a formal mathematical system. We seek to rectify this by making clear the connection between pertinent problems in the real-world and their mathematical solutions. One of our most ambitious aims is to restore the connection between mathematics and the mathematical problems that arise in the real world. Gone are the days when mathematicians concern themselves with anything so tangible as the orbits of planets or the configuration of bridges, which inspired Poincare and Euler; eBourbaki will provide a forum for such connections to be re-established. In doing so we will explicitly address the oft-asked question in mathematics classes: ‘What’s the application?’

About Mathematical Modeling

Mathematical models can range from the trivially simple – maximize the area of a rectangle given fixed perimeter – to the stunningly complex – estimate population recombination rates from single nucleotide polymorphism data – but all share essential characteristics. These are:

1. A mathematical model is only as useful as its simplifying assumptions. Every math model begins its life by translating a problem into mathematical language. This translation can involve interpretation of the ‘essential aspects’ of the problem. Quality mathematical modelers are explicit about their assumptions and will take care to consider the behaviors of the chosen model when questionable assumptions are violated.
2. Mathematical models are often not difficult to produce. The thinking is the hard part; if modelers are reasonably well acquainted with a standard range of modeling tools – programming, Matlab, Mathematica, or Maple, among others – together with the incredible range of specific packages available on the internet suited to a panoply of situations, they have the potential at least to do as well as academic scientists, statisticians, and mathematicians. Ingenuity is the only barrier to success.
3. Almost any question of optimization can be, at least in part, addressed by a math model. This means that a potentially vast range of issues can be explored with math models. Math models are not only widely applicable, but provide the best approach because they provide some measure of accountability in the recommendations that follow from them.