Inside the Data

A team of math students from Pomona and Harvey Mudd took home one of the three top prizes at UCLA’s 2019 DataFest, winning for Best Use of External Data. Given a data set from the Canadian women’s national rugby team, Amy Watt ’20, Adam Rees ’20, Ethan Ashby ’21, Connor Ford ’20, and Madelyn Andersen (HMC ’22) found something important hidden in the data.“The really creative thing they did was to find flight information from looking at the social media proathletes,” explains Pomona Math Professor Jo Hardin. “They were able to come up with a very clear relationship between fatigue and flying.”