VOLUME 11, NO. 3     FEBRUARY 1998

In the chips

wo Massachusetts Academy of Mathematics and Science seniors entered a Seventeen magazine contest this fall, vying for a chance to win cash awards and to appear on the PBS program "Bill Nye, The Science Guy." Their challenge? To prove, with a mathematical equation, that a bag of Chips Ahoy cookies contains more than 1,000 chocolate chips.

Elizabeth Zalman and Bijaya Padhy came up with a formula using their math skills to beat out almost 2,000 other entries from all over the country. Their prize was $1,000 and 60 bags of the chocolate chip cookies. They also earned the right to compete for another $4,000 in prize money in mid-October in Boston. The panel of judges included Bill Nye.

The pair pulled an all-nighter to meet the deadline. "Doing the math was the easy part," they admitted. "The hard part was to make our solution seem harder than it actually was." The students drafted a 3,000-word essay, more than 10 times the suggested length. Their formula? They measured the volume of both cookie and chip, dividing one into the other, to find that chips take up 3.2 percent of each cookie.

Zaltman represented the duo at the Boston event; Padhy was busy studying for her WPI courses. Although they didn't win, they made a lot of friends at the academy - cartons upon cartons of cookies arrived a week later and were completely devoured in a few hours.

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