Math Majors Using Math to Help Math Departments

Two Models for Assigning Teaching Assistants to Courses

Samuel Asher

University of California, Davis

Trevor Chan

University of California, Davis

Jesus De Loera

University of California, Davis


Abstract

Every year, graduate students are chosen to assist in the teaching of classes. Traditionally, staff uses the graduate students' course preferences to manually match the graduate students to their preferred classes. Unfortunately, this is a time-consuming process and designated assignments generally fail to produce an optimal solution. In order to remedy this issue, we modified two classical mathematical models for assignment problems, namely the Gale-Shapley algorithm and integer programming. Both of our models produced a pairing of graduate students to classes while attempting to maximize the satisfaction of the graduate students. We also created a website interface that gathers preference data from the graduate students and allows the staff to easily perform the matching.