Troy High School Students Reach National Math Competition Finals

FULLERTON, CA — Troy High School students earned a top spot in a national math competition this year, amid the coronavirus shutdown. These students, Soham Bose, Jimmy Li, Ho Lyun Jeong, and Rahil Shah – advanced to the finals in MathWorks Math Modeling (M3) Challenge, the only competition of its kind which this year drew more than 3,500 11th and 12th-grade participants from across the nation.

The Fullerton, California team's work is undergoing intense scrutiny by a panel of judges across the country. Those judges will determine a winner based upon final ranking on Monday, April 27.

For the first time in the history of the competition, final judging will not be an all-day in-person event in New York City.

The coronavirus pandemic derailed the traditional M3 Challenge final event, where the finalist teams headed to New York City in late April to compete against each other for the "Champion" title at the offices of Jane Street, a quantitative trading firm.

Instead, all judging is taking place virtually this year.

Using mathematical modeling, the Troy High School students had 14 hours in late February and early March to come up with a solution to a real-world issue – transitioning to sustainable, large-scale electric trucking in the United States.

Each team was to create mathematical models to predict what percentage of semi-trucks will be electric in the next few years and decades. To make it work, they would need to determine the number and locations of charging stations along major U.S. trucking routes, essential for the new all-electric trucking industry. Finally, they would need to prioritize which national routes to develop with the electric charging infrastructure in mind.

Each team had to make intelligent decisions about the necessary charging infrastructure and weigh the economic and environmental implications for the communities surrounding the trucking corridors.

The problem was developed with assistance from the North American Council for Freight Efficiency (NACFE), which advised about some of the big, burning questions in transitioning from diesel to electric trucks, and provided data sets for teams to use. More than 760 participating teams submitted papers detailing their recommended solutions.

"As we wrote this year's question, we were thinking about how Americans are shifting to a mindset of online purchasing, which means goods travel on our highways differently than they did in the past," says M3 Challenge judge and lead problem developer Karen Bliss, Virginia Military Institute. "Just a few weeks later, we are living in a world where we can't go out as freely and where it's common to see store shelves empty of essential items. We are all reminded of the importance of trucking to our economy and well-being. It's great that teams were able to provide insight on how we might increase rates of truckers adopting more efficient technology and think about an industry that deserves praise at this uncertain time."

Presented by Philadelphia-based Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and sponsored by MathWorks, M3 Challenge – now in its 15th year – spotlights applied mathematics as a powerful problem-solving tool and motivates students to consider further education and careers in math, science, and computing. Winning teams will be awarded a share of $100,000 in scholarships, with the champion team receiving $20,000.

"M3 Challenge was a lot of fun and allowed each member of our team to apply themselves towards a unified goal by utilizing their strengths and neutralizing the weaknesses of others," said team member Soham Bose. "M3 Challenge teaches teamwork."

The problem-solving effort is a real-world application and simulation of future work these math experts may experience.

"Given the 14-hour time frame, a lot must be done, from data collection to understanding the problem well enough to come up with equations that fit the scenario, and finally implementing the solution into code," he said. "I think what the team learned from participating in this challenge was teamwork and the importance of laying out a game plan when approaching a problem that initially seems insurmountable."

For more information about M3 Challenge, visit m3challenge.siam.org.

Visit m3challenge.siam.org to learn more about this year's challenge problem.