LINCROFT – A combination of math smarts and creative thinking has added up to a top spot in a the national MathWorks Math Modeling (M3) Challenge for a team from High Technology High School for the third year in a row.
The team, consisting of students Jason Yan, Eric Chai, Emily Jiang, Gustav Hansen, and Kyle Lui, (pictured above with their coach Raymond Eng, a teacher at the school), will head to New York City April 29 to compete against five other finalist teams at the offices of Jane Street, a quantitative trading firm.
Using mathematical modeling, the students had 14 hours in late February to come up with a solution to a real-world issue – substance abuse in the United States. The problem asked teams to create a mathematical model to predict the spread of nicotine use due to vaping over the next 10 years, to build a second model to simulate the likelihood that a given individual will use a given substance, then predict how many high school seniors will use these substances.
More than 875 teams from across the U.S. participated. Organized by Philadelphia-based Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and sponsored by MathWorks, M3 Challenge – now in its 14th year – spotlights applied mathematics as a powerful problem-solving tool and motivates students to consider further education and careers in math and science. Approximately 35 scholarship prizes totaling $100,000 are up for grabs, with the champion team receiving $20,000.
“The M3 Challenge is a real-life experience dealing with a very complex, open-ended topical issue,” said Ellen LeBlanc, mathematics teacher at High Tech, who helped coach the students in preparation for the 14-hour challenge. “The student team must synthesize a mathematical model from an immense amount of research and incomplete information.”
