Stevenson Students Advance To Finals in 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 Lincolnshire high school seniors.

The students – Joshua Yoon, Haoyang Yu, Albert Cao, Deepak Moparthi and Andrew Hwang, of Adlai E Stevenson High School – have advanced to the finals in the popular MathWorks Math Modeling (M3) Challenge, the only competition of its kind which this year drew more than 4,175 11th and 12th grade participants from across the nation. The Lincolnshire team will head to New York City on April 30 to compete against five other finalist teams at 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 – food insecurity in the United States. The Challenge problem posited that food wasted in households, cafeterias, restaurants, and grocery stores is not “trash,” but might be thoughtfully repurposed. Teams were ultimately asked for model-based strategies to quantify, reduce, and repurpose the most food for the least cost. More than 900 participating teams from across the U.S. submitted papers detailing their recommended solutions.

“Food insecurity affected 12.3 percent of U.S. households in 2016, roughly 42 million Americans. These households had difficulty putting enough food on the table,” said Alisha Coleman-Jensen, Ph.D., Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Food insecurity is related to poor health among adults and children, and poorer educational achievement among children. It has real impacts on families and individuals.”

Organized by Philadelphia-based Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and sponsored by MathWorks, 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 37 scholarship prizes totaling $100,000 are up for grabs, with the champion team receiving $20,000.

In addition to Adlai E Stevenson High School, the five other finalist teams hail from high schools in Middlebury, Vermont; Los Altos, California;Osprey, Florida; Lincroft, New Jersey; and Waxhaw, North Carolina.

"I look forward to M3 Challenge every year,” said Paul Kim, Mathematics teacher at Adlai E Stevenson High School, who coached the school’s students in preparation for the 14-hour challenge. “It is an invitation for students to prepare, be creative and dare to work harder than they ever have. M3 Challenge is not just a great experience... it is a path for future endeavors.”

Team member Joshua Yoon appreciates the real-world applications of math that M3 Challenge provides. “We were very excited to participate in M3 Challenge for the second time, as it is a competition unlike any other,” he said. “The structure of the Challenge makes it an amazing opportunity to bond as a team and push ourselves to meet the pressure of completing various tasks under a deadline. It challenges us to combine the mathematics we've learned with our creativity and problem solving skills, and utilize them in novel ways to analyze a real world problem."

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

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