Anne van der Giessen, a Year 12 student at Kingscote campus, won the Cadena-Foster Prize for her Probability project entry in the SA Mathematics Talent Quest. She was awarded her prize of $150 at a ceremony in Adelaide, by the Mathematical Association of SA.

Anne’s project examined the mathematics behind the surprising results of medical testing. Earlier this year it was announced that Australian researchers had developed a blood test to detect ovarian cancer in its early stages. The new test is 94 per cent accurate at present. The federal government will not subsidise the cost of the test for general use until it is 99 per cent accurate.

After the announcement there was quite a lot of criticism of the government policy in the media. Anne used the mathematics of conditional probability together with current statistics available about the incidence of ovarian cancer to show why the government policy is reasonable, because of the huge number of “false positives” that would occur if large numbers of the general population were to be tested. She also investigated strategies that should be pursued by the medical fraternity to make subsidising the test more viable.

During the State level judging Anne’s project was selected to be one of SA’s entries in the National Mathematics Talent Quest which will be judged later this year.