Johns Creek Students Advance To Finals In National Math Competition

From Gail Bergman PR: A combination of math smarts and creative thinking has added up to a top spot in a major national math competition for five Johns Creek high school seniors.

The students – Daniel Bodea, Jamie Wang, Anshul Tusnial, Akhil Vaidya and Alex Hammond of Johns Creek High School – have advanced to the finals in the popular Moody’s Mega Math (M3) Challenge, the only competition of its kind which this year drew more than 5,100 11th and 12th grade participants from across the nation. The Johns Creek team will head to New York City on April 24 to compete against five other finalist teams at Moody’s Corporation World Trade Center headquarters.

Using mathematical modeling, the students had 14 hours in late February to come up with a solution to a real-world issue – helping the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) devise a plan for future growth and sustainability in spite of global change factors expected to affect both resources and visits at its 417 national sites country wide. More than 1,100 participating teams from across the U.S. submitted papers detailing their recommended solutions.

"The National Park Service is privileged to work with the high school mathematicians in Moody's Mega Math Challenge,” said Dr. Rebecca Beavers, Coastal Geology and Adaptation Coordinator at NPS. “These bright young minds hold the keys to innovative solutions for many environmental concerns, including climate change."

Organized by Philadelphia-based Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and sponsored by The Moody’s Foundation, the M3 Challenge – now in its 12th year – spotlights applied mathematics as a powerful problem-solving tool and motivates students to consider further education and careers in math and science. Approximately 90 scholarship prizes totaling $150,000 are up for grabs, with the champion team receiving $20,000.

In addition to Johns Creek High School, the five other finalist teams hail from high schools in Durham, North Carolina; Lincolnshire, Illinois; Lincroft, New Jersey; Silver Spring, Maryland; and Westford, Massachusetts.

“The students have taken many different math and computing courses and now they have the opportunity to use what they learned to analyze and model challenging real world problems,” said Julie Meert, Mathematics Teacher at Johns Creek High School, who coached the school’s students in preparation for the 14-hour challenge. “This is a diverse group of students who had to pull together as a team, using and appreciating one another’s strength and abilities to create a clear, detailed solution in a short amount of time. I am impressed with the level of rigor, analysis and technical writing skills exhibited by our students both at the individual level and as a team.”

For team member Daniel Bodea, placing as a finalist in the M3 Challenge opened his eyes to the possibilities of math. "The M3 Challenge allowed our group of students with diverse interests to bond and engage in 14 hours of mathematical modeling of an issue that mattered to us: climate change and its massive impact on our world,” he said. “The teamwork was empowering and the competition exciting. It showed us that the world can be boiled down to math, and that modeling is only a question of finding the right mathematical associations that describe the world, getting creative with them, and simulating them."

According to Arlene Isaacs-Lowe, President of The Moody’s Foundation, M3 Challenge winners and finalists have gone on to excel at both college and career. “We are at a critical moment in history where there is a very real international need for our youth to pursue careers in STEM-related fields so we can sufficiently fill an increased number of jobs coming down the pike in this field,” Isaacs-Lowe said. “M3 Challenge increases that interest in the US in a fun, unique and exciting way.”

For more information about the M3 Challenge, visit m3challenge.siam.org. To access this year’s challenge problem, visit here.

Photo via Gail Bergman PR: Johns Creek students and coach, from the left: Daniel Bodea, Akhil Vaidya, Jamie Wang, Julie Meert (coach), Anshul Tusnial, and Alex Hammond.