John Papp is a Mathematics and Quantitative Economics major who made the dean's list every semester and won the Lewis F. Manly Memorial Prize (given to the Tufts undergraduate who combines academic excellence with superior athletic performance), the Prize Scholarship of the Class of 1882 (for undergraduates with great potential for intellectual leadership and creativity), the Daniel Ounjian Prize in Economics, the Charles G. Bluhdorn Prize in Economics (for an undergraduate majoring in economics who has demonstrated outstanding scholastic ability) and the Class of 1898 Prize (for students who have best demonstrated not only high scholarly ability, but also a wide range of intellectual interests and competence). Several of these are among the most distinguished awards at Tufts. He also was co-captain of the Tufts Crew.
When he was a sophomore, he stood out in a graduate Econometrics class. He spent his junior year abroad at Oxford University, and continued working over the summer of 2005 for Professor Lloyd N. Trefethen in the Oxford Department of Mathematics who was the third Wiener lecturer at Tufts in the fall of 2005.
With Professor Metcalf in Economics he wrote an excellent honors thesis using sophisticated mathematical tools (the E-M algorithm which combines a Kalman Filter with method of moments estimations) to analyze the effect of social security on saving in the US. Social Security wealth is the implicit value of the future stream of SS benefits that retirees will obtain. Economic theory is ambiguous whether SS raises or lowers national saving. Papp built on seminal work in economics to generalize approaches to answering this question (impact on national saving) by allowing for perceptions about the solvency of the program to enter into the analysis. This is a good example of the intersection between mathematics and economics.
John has been popular among his classmates, es evidenced by his serving as co-president of the Economics Society during 2005. We are happy that he will continue his academic career by attending graduate school at Princeton University this fall.