Marlboro Students and Team at High Tech High Win Math Contest

Students at High Tech Technology High School in Lincroft entered a math competition, only to find themselves coming up with a mathematical solution for a debate currently before the U.S. Congress.

Angela Zhou, Kevin Zhou and Stephen Guo of Marlboro, Vineel Chakradhar of Manalapan, Daniel Takash of Brielle, eleventh and twelfth-graders from the High Technology High School, Lincroft, were found to have come up with the most sound mathematical solution to the country’s proposed new high-speed Acela rail program.

The NJ team of five placed first in the 2012 Moody’s Mega Math (M³) Challenge, sharing $20,000 from a total $115,000 scholarship pool. They were chosen from thousands of student participants.

The students presented their findings at The Moody’s Corporation New York, NY headquarters yesterday, along with five other finalist teams.

The contest, drew nearly 5,000 eleventh and twelfth-graders from the Eastern U.S. who were asked to use mathematical modeling to determine the best regions in the country to revive the Department of Transportation’s planned High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail (HSIPR) program — a hot topic in Congress due to the success of North America’s only high speed rail line, Amtrak’s Acela Express.

From recommending the best regions for the rail lines to predicting ridership numbers, cost of implementation and effects of such a program on foreign-energy dependence, teams of three to five students put the problem-solving skills they learned in the classroom to the test.

“If we won this, it means that these PhD mathematician judges felt that we had a compelling and cogent solution,” said Vineel Chakradhar from the champion team. “That says a lot, because while we were taking steps and making assumptions and solving the problem, we didn’t really know if we were doing it right, if we were taking the right approach. But that’s just an aspect of applied math, I guess, nobody is really certain what to expect or whether your approach is right – you just have to do the best you can with what information you have.”

Daniel Takash, also from the champion team, explained: “While delivering the final answer, when I was summing up the total amounts of money, I saw a lot of digits in red — and I became very nervous because I thought we’d done something wrong, but then I realized this makes sense.

If you look deeper and deeper, high speed rail is not the wisest transportation choice. In the 1950s we made the decision to invest in highways and airports — that’s the infrastructure decision we made back then when Europe and Asia made a different infrastructure decision. This is the path we chose and we should stick to it. It would be prohibitively expensive to change, especially with talk of multi-trillion dollar deficits and debt.”

First runners up in the contest are Connor Davis, Mia de los Reyes, Alyssa Ferris, Sam Magura, and Vitchyr Pong from North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham, NC, who split a $15,000 scholarship prize. Third place winners are Madeline Jenkins, Samuel Kirschbaum, Joel Sharin, Steven Tang, and Sorin Vatasoiu from Nashoba Regional High School in Bolton, MA, who shared a $10,000 in scholarship funds.

Members of the judging panel included professional mathematicians Ben Fusaro,Florida State University; Lee Seitelman, United Technologies (retired); Kathleen Shannon, Salisbury University; and David Sprecher, The University of California,Santa Barbara (retired).  Prior to yesterday’s final judging round, the nearly 1,000 student submissions were assessed by 107 judges from across the country, who then narrowed down the entries to six finalists.

View full list of winners here, on the challenge website.