Pine View Team Wins Math Challenge

Five team members from Pine View School took center stage last week, displaying their $20,000 prize check, at Moody’s Corporation headquarters in New York. The young men and woman emerged as the Champions of the 2011 Challenge, an Internet-based applied math contest, organized by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, a Moody Corp press release said. 

“It was awesome. We are still sort of in shock, I think,” said Pine View’s Caroline Bowman, describing the moment the award was announced. “It was such a mix of feelings – of course, you’re nervous, you want to compete at the top, but at the same time you’re thinking you’re already in the top six so you cannot be unhappy, no matter what.” 

“It was a great experience overall because it gave us the opportunity to work with a real-world problem— to do something that real analysts would do,” said teammate Jason Oettinger. “I have participated in other projects that work with math, but nothing to this scale.” 

Their victory was made all the more special by the fact that it was the school’s first time ever competing in the Challenge and that the students had only become aware of the contest two weeks prior to Challenge weekend, the release said. 

Teacher-coach Ann Hankinson took little acclaim for her team’s feat, saying, “I give the students all the credit. All of the kids have their gifts in all kinds of things and they work together really well. They are used to team competitions and they are highly competitive. I knew their various strengths in math, computers, and economics, and it was good to have a team with a variety of skills.”