The Problem with Baseball Hats — Presentation Detail — Celebration of Scholars

Instructions

Student presentations must have a faculty sponsor.

Abstracts must include a title and a description of the research, scholarship, or creative work. The description should be 150-225 words in length and constructed in a format or style appropriate for the presenter’s discipline.

The following points should be addressed within the selected format or style for the abstract:

A clear statement of the problem or question you pursued, or the scholarly goal or creative theme achieved in your work.
A brief comment about the significance or uniqueness of the work.
A clear description of the methods used to achieve the purpose or goals for the work.
A statement of the conclusions, results, outcomes, or recommendations, or if the work is still in progress, the results you expect to report at the event.

Presenter photographs should be head and shoulder shots comparable to passport photos.

Additional Information

More information is available at carthage.edu/celebration-scholars/. The following are members of the Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Committee who are eager to listen to ideas and answer questions:

Jun Wang
Kim Instenes
John Kirk
Nora Nickels
Andrew Pustina
James Ripley

The Problem with Baseball Hats

Name: Micole Gauvin
Major: Mathematics and Elementary Education
Hometown: Beloit, WI
Faculty Sponsor: Mark Snavely
Other Sponsors:
Type of research: Senior thesis

Abstract

A young baseball player stacks n baseball hats by each door to his home. Each time he leaves the house to go practice, he grabs a hat from the stack by the door he exits; when he returns to his home after practice, he leaves his hat on the stack by the door he enters. In our problem we consider how many times, on average, the baseball player will go out to practice and back into his house before the stack of baseball hats by the door he exits runs out. We begin with an examination of two doors starting with n hats by each to determine a formula that calculates how many cycles the boy will run through before he goes to grab a hat as he leaves the house, but instead finds an empty stack. We will then broaden our focus, as we start to consider the implications other nuances/alterations might bring to the problem, looking at what happens when we add an additional door, evaluate the variance surrounding our average, introduce the probability that the boy could lose a hat (or come back with extra!) and etc. Thus we will see the problem with baseball hats as we seek to find the solution to this mathematical problem—though perhaps not quite the solution an actual baseball player (or his mom) might want.

Poster file