MCPS recently shared the news of John Chase, math resource teacher at Walter Johnson High School, winning the Carl B. Allendoerfer Award for expository mathematical writing from the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), for an article he co-wrote, “Bacterial Growth: Not So Simple,” in Mathematics Magazine.
Chase co-wrote the article with Matthew Wright, and the article was inspired by conversations with colleague Will Rose, a teacher in the magnet program at Montgomery Blair High School.
“I am honored to receive the Carl B. Allendoerfer Award, together with my coauthor Matthew Wright. Our paper was inspired by conversations with one of my high school math teacher colleagues, Will Rose, who questioned the underlying premises of bacterial growth. I did work in stochastic processes in my graduate program, and I thought this would be a perfect time to put that knowledge to use. When Matthew and I first uncovered the results in our paper, we found them surprising and delightful. Using bacterial growth as a first example of exponential growth is so commonplace it seemed unlikely that there would be anything new to say. We are pleased that others found the paper surprising and delightful as well. Our results are not groundbreaking and are likely well-known by those who have a deep knowledge of stochastic processes, but we were glad for the opportunity this paper gave us to popularize these results. We hope that this expository treatment of the topic will open conversations among educators and students in both undergraduate and secondary settings. I hope that any recognition the award brings will broaden the reach of our paper and highlight the delightful mathematics, not just the authors.”
Per MAA: In bacterial growth models we often use average time to division to get a simple exponential function for the number of bacteria at a given time. However, as the authors of this article demonstrate, the growth of the bacteria population depends in interesting and surprising ways on the overall distribution of the time to division, rather than just the average. In fact, for the natural distributions the authors examine, the usual model significantly underestimates the bacterial population’s growth over time. This paper’s elucidating mix of theory and simulation shows readers the surprising depths of an apparently simple problem.