Silver Spring Students Head To Major National Math Competition

SILVER SPRING, MD — A combination of math smarts and creative thinking is sending a team of five students from Montgomery Blair High School to New York City to participate in the prestigious Moody's Mega Math Challenge.

The students – James Vinson, Eshan Tewari, Siddharth Taneja, Andrew Komo and Annie Zhao, juniors and seniors at Montgomery Blair High School – have advanced to the finals of this major national math competition that will take place at the World Trade Center headquarters on April 24.

The competition draws more than 5,000 junior and seniors from across the U.S. The Silver Spring team will compete against five other finalist teams. Prizes range from about 90 scholarships totaling to $150,000, and the winning team will receive $20,000.

Montgomery Blair High School students had 14 hours in late February to come up with a solution to a real-world issue using mathematical modeling. The students helped the U.S. National Park Service 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.

“Even though I've known all five of the students on my team since they were in 9th grade and personally taught them math in multiple years, I didn't realize what they were truly capable of until I read their paper,” said William Rose, a math teacher at Montgomery Blair High School, who coached the students in preparation for the 14-hour challenge.

Moody's Mega Math Challenge will give the students the opportunity to see what it's like to work as a team to tackle a real-world problem under time and resource constraints, similar to challenges professional mathematicians face.

“The Moody's M3 Challenge forces the students to combine their skills from math, statistics, computer science and writing classes in ways that go beyond any one thing we ever ask them to do at school,” Rose said. “I can't imagine what they could accomplish if we gave them a week or a month to come up with a solution, instead of just 14 hours."

For more information about the M3 Challenge, visit their site here.