Professors Win Carl B. Allendoerfer Award for Outstanding Paper

Professor Irl Bivens and Professor Emeritus Ben Klein won the Carl B. Allendoerfer Award for an outstanding paper in Mathematics Magazine at the recent "MathFest" meeting of the Southeast Section of the Mathematics Association of America (MAA).

Their article, titled "The Median Value of a Continuous Function," appeared in the February 2015 edition of the magazine.

The award was established in 1976 to recognize authors of articles of expository excellence. The citation for the award asserted that "Bivens and Klein take a familiar topic from introductory statistics and apply it to continuous functions in an intuitive and beautiful way... The concept and its utility spring to life in an enlightening and entertaining way as the authors reveal many surprising results."

In their response, Bivens and Klein said their exploration of the subject began within "a seemingly innocent calculus problem" that ended up leading to many years of consideration, including publication of more than a dozen articles on the subject.