Lincroft's High Technology Teens Compete In Int'l Math Competition

LINCROFT, NJ — For 14 straight hours in early March, a small group of High Technology High School students competed in an international online math modeling competition.

The students — Michael Gao, Amanda Guan, Kevin Guan, Amanda Lin and Kevin Liu, all students who attend High Technology High School in the Lincroft section of Middletown — are one of the eight finalist teams in MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge (M3 Challenge).

“Pure math is interesting, but it's even more beautiful to see how the patterns in math find their way into real-life phenomena," said local teen and team captain Kevin Guan.

This is a unique international competition that drew nearly 3,000 11th and 12th graders in the U.S. and sixth-form students in the U.K.

The team, whose work underwent intense scrutiny by judges in the first two rounds of assessment, has one last hurdle on April 24, when they present their findings to a panel of professional mathematicians for final validation.

Using mathematical modeling, these Monmouth County teens had to come up with solutions to real-world questions: How many e-bikes will be sold in the next two years? Of the many factors that contribute to e-bike use and sales growth, which are most significant? For a given country or region, can we quantify the impact that e-bike use has on carbon emissions, traffic congestion or other key factors?

“M3 Challenge is a special opportunity for students to study and analyze current real-world phenomena that have wide ranging impacts on society,” says High Technology teacher-coach Raymond Eng. “Especially this year’s problem — e-bikes are an early-stage technology with tremendous possibilities where the many impacts are not yet fully defined or understood. The student team must synthesize a mathematical model from a select amount of data and incomplete information. M3 Challenge is a new experience for students where there is not a definitive answer. The team gets to experience what an analyst must deal with in the real world.”

A total of 650 teams submitted papers detailing their recommendations. Roughly 45% of those submissions included technical computing to support and enhance their solutions, and those coding skills make them eligible for additional scholarship prizes.

"News feeds, magazines, and everyday discussions seem to be filled with talk of ‘the future of the automobile,’” says M3 Challenge judge and lead problem developer Neil Nicholson, from the University of Notre Dame. “In the past couple years, though, the rise in popularity of smaller electric personal transportation devices has somewhat changed the conversation. While these changes can be meaningful at the individual level, they also are shaping larger scale policy-related questions. It is really interesting to see how the modelers attacked these questions, because understanding how the past influences the future will surely provide insight into these big real-world issues."

Now in its 18th year, M3 Challenge is a program of Philadelphia-based Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and is sponsored by MathWorks.

Winning teams will be awarded a share of $100,000 in scholarships, with the champion team receiving $20,000 in 2023.

To access this year’s challenge problem, visit https://m3challenge.siam.org/practice-problems/2023-problem-ride-wind-without-getting-winded-growth-e-bike-use.