For our project,we decided to find which spot on Bryn Mawr campus would be the most convenient for the most people, in other words, the optimal spot. To do this, we first had to set up a coordinate system to use and assign each dorm door a position on that graph. We used the measure function on google maps and set the intersection between New Gulph Rd and N Merion Ave as our X and Y axes, so each dorm’s position is a measure in feet of how far they are from each of these two roads.
Once we had coordinates for each dorm door, we entered them into Mathematica and created a scatter plot. With this scatter plot, we overlaid it on the satellite image of Bryn Mawr to make sure everything lined up. After checking that, we used the distance formula, entering each point we had mapped out in order to find the optimal spot. For every dorm door being used, the optimal spot was found to be on the northern green outside of Great Hall. We also wanted to find more than just the optimal point for using every dorm door, so we created a selection menu to choose specific doors only to better fit certain situations. For the presentation here, there is the map for all doors and there is one that finds the optimal point when using only one door per dorm; for this situation, the point moved slightly to be the main path in front of the Great Hall.
