The UMAPJournal Publisher COMAP, Inc. Vol. 25, No. 3 Executive Publisher Solomon A. Garfunkel ILAP Editor Chris Arney Interim Vice-President for Academic Affairs The College of Saint Rose 432 Western Avenue Albany, NY 12203 [email protected] Editor On Jargon Editor Yves Nievergelt Paul J. Campbell Department of Mathematics Campus Box 194 Eastern Washington University Beloit College Cheney, WA 99004 700 College St. [email protected] Beloit, WI 53511–5595 [email protected] Reviews Editor James M. Cargal Mathematics Dept. Associate Editors Troy University— Montgomery Campus Don Adolphson Brigham Young University 231 Montgomery St. Chris Arney The College of St. Rose Montgomery, AL 36104 Ron Barnes University of Houston—Downtown [email protected] Arthur Benjamin Harvey Mudd College James M. Cargal Troy State University Montgomery Chief Operating Officer Murray K. Clayton University of Wisconsin—Madison Laurie W. Arag´on Courtney S. Coleman Harvey Mudd College Linda L. 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Vol. 25, No. 3 2004 Table of Contents Publisher’s Editorial The Good Fight Solomon A. Garfunkel ..................................185 Special Section on the MCM Results of the 2004 Mathematical Contest in Modeling Frank Giordano . ..................................... 189 The Myth of “The Myth of Fingerprints” Steven G. Amery, Eric Thomas Harley, and Eric J. Malm . ....215 Can’t Quite Put Our Finger OnIt Séamus Ó Ceallaigh, Alva Sheeley, and Aidan Crangle . .......231 Not Such a Small Whorl After All Brian Camley, Pascal Getreuer, and Bradley Klingenberg . ..... 245 Rule of Thumb: Prints Beat DNA Seth Miller, Dustin Mixon, and Jonathan Pickett ..............259 Judge’s Commentary: The Outstanding Fingerprints Papers Michael Tortorella . 261 Practitioner’s Commentary: The Outstanding Fingerprints Papers Mary Beeton ........................................ 267 Editor’s Commentary: Fingerprint Identification Paul J. Campbell ...................................... 273 A Myopic Aggregate-Decision Model Ivan Corwin, Sheel Ganatra, and Nikita Rozenblyum ......... 281 Theme-Park Queueing Systems Alexander V. Frolkin, Frederick D.W. van der Wyck, and Stephen Burgess. 301 Developing Improved Algorithms for QuickPass Systems Moorea L. Brega, Alejandro L. Cantarero, and Corry L. Lee . 319 KalmanQueue: An Adaptive Approach to Virtual Queueing Tracy Clark Lovejoy, Aleksandr Yakovlevitch Aravkin, and Casey Schneider-Mizell .................................337 Theme Park Simulation with a Nash-Equilibrium-Based Visitor Behavior Model Andrew Spann, Daniel Gulotta, and Daniel Kane . 353 Judges’ Commentary: The Quick Pass Fusaro Award Paper Peter Ansbach and Kathleen M. Shannon . 354 Publisher’s Editorial 185 Publisher’s Editorial The Good Fight Solomon A. Garfunkel Executive Director COMAP, Inc. 57 Bedford St., Suite 210 Lexington, MA 02420 [email protected] The MCM issue of The UMAP Journal has historically been an opportunity for me to reflect on the year at COMAP and discuss with you many of the new projects underway. I am, with your indulgence, going to diverge from that tradition this year. Perhaps it is the coming (as I write this) election, but this has been an extremely political year. And that politics is having its effect on all of us involved in mathematics education. I have found myself as a consequence writing pieces that are more “polemical” in nature—defending our beliefs and our work within our community and without. So, with no apologies, here are two short essays that reflect my thoughts on the “good fight.” Mathematical Breadth for All The discussion (debate, war) about differentiating the curriculum for stu- dents with the perceived ability to go on in mathematics vs. the rest usually misses the crucial point of breadth. It is in many ways ironic that the “mathe- matics for all” movement has succeeded in infusing the secondary school math- ematics curriculum with many important ideas and concepts that the “better” students simply do not see. A great deal of effort has gone into the creation of materials intended to show all students the usefulness of mathematics, through the use of contemporary applications and the processes of mathematical mod- eling. In many cases, this means teaching more discrete mathematics such as graph theory, game theory, social choice theory, and operations research. Henry Pollak is fond of saying that there are four reasons for students to learn mathematics—to help them as they enter the world of work, to make them more knowledgeable citizens, to help them in their daily lives, and to The UMAP Journal 24 (3) (2003) 185–188. c Copyright 2004 by COMAP,Inc. All rights reserved. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice. Abstracting with credit is permitted, but copyrights for components of this work owned by others than COMAP must be honored. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists requires prior permission from COMAP. 186 The UMAP Journal 25.3 (2004) have them appreciate the beauty and power of the discipline. Clearly, for the mathematically talented, we focus on the last, while for more average or less motivated students, we (hopefully) stress the first three. I believe that this is a terrible mistake and that we are paying a terrible price. It is no secret that there has been a worldwide decline in mathematics ma- jors. In the U.S., the half-life of students in mathematics courses, from 10th grade to the Ph.D., remains one year. In other words, if we look at the students enrolled in 11th-grade math courses, there are approximately half as many as were enrolled the previous year in 10th-grade math courses, and so on to the Ph.D. I argue that while we are doing a much better job in showing aver- age students the importance