Stevenson Students Advance To National Math Competition

From M3: A combination of math smarts and creative thinking has added up to a top spot in a major national math competition for five Adlai E. Stevenson High School students.

The students – Matthew Jalnos, Joey Rivkin, Tony Tan, Joshua Tsai, and Angela Zhang 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 over 4,000 11th and 12th grade participants from across the nation. The Lincolnshire, Illinois team will head to New York City on 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 and compare vaping to cigarette use, and then to build a second model to simulate the likelihood that a given individual will use a given substance, considering social influence and characteristic traits as well as characteristics of the drug itself. Then they were asked to predict how many high school seniors will use these substances. Students were finally tasked with developing a metric to measure and rank the impact of the use of various substances. More than 875 participating teams from across the U.S. submitted papers detailing their recommended solutions.

“Participants could use simulation and programming, probability and statistics, or even algebra to model the number of students who choose to use different substances,” said problem co-writer Katie Kavanagh, Clarkson University. “These students offer a unique perspective on what factors are important to consider, particularly at that critical, influential time in their own lives.”

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.

In addition to Adlai E. Stevenson High School, the five other finalist teams hail from high schools in Nashua, New Hampshire; Glendale, Wisconsin; Rockville, Maryland; Lincroft, New Jersey; and Plymouth, Minnesota.

“Students do their finest work when there is a great challenge, and every year I look forward to how M3 Challenge dares students to bring forth their very best selves,” said Paul Kim, Mathematics Teacher at Adlai E. Stevenson High School, who coached the school’s students in preparation for the 14-hour challenge. “The experience is incomparable and we are grateful to be a part of it.”

For team member Angela Zhang, placing as a finalist in M3 Challenge opened her eyes to the possibilities of math. “M3 challenge has been an exciting opportunity for us to explore the various applications of math in the context of real world problems. Through the competition, we have been challenged to apply our mathematical knowledge to model complex issues and find creative solutions to better our communities.”

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

To access this year’s challenge problem, visit https://m3challenge.siam.org/practice-problems/2019-challenge-problem-one-too-many-and-thousand-not-enough-substance-use-and.

Media are invited to interview the students and their coach. Excellent visuals are available.