Alexandria Students Head To Finals Of International Math Competition

ALEXANDRIA, VA — A team of students from Alexandria’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology beat out thousands of competitors to become one of nine finalists in the MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge.

They’ll head to New York City on April 27 for the last stage of the competition, where they’ll present their findings to a panel of judges.

Subscribe

Students Ashwath Muppa, Shresth Jaiswal, Varun Ananthakrishnan, Agastya Sondhi and Adhiraj Chhoda competed against their peers across the U.S., England and Wales to use math modeling over one 14-hour session to address this year’s problem: How to model gambling behavior and assess its financial and social impacts.

The students wrestled with whether societies should be concerned about the growth in online sports gambling, how to gauge how much money is being lost to sports gambling, and how much is too much for an individual to spend on online sports gambling.

Out of a total of 770 papers submitted to the challenge this year, according to MathWorks, 153 advanced to the second round. A total of 37 distinctions will be awarded with scholarship prizes. The Alexandria students are in the running for the top six awards, ranging from $5,000 to $20,000.

The students told Patch what they had learned in the process and how it had shifted some of their views, particularly on regulation and how access to credit while gambling can increase the risk of disaster.

Chhoda and Sondhi said their work on the project made them more supportive of gambling regulation, particularly credit regulation, as the students saw how increased credit could lead to increased damage to a household through a betting loss.

“My view has shifted toward stronger regulation focused on consumer protection, especially through limits on credit-funded betting, tighter oversight of promotions, and better education around the risks of gambling,” Chhoda said.

The competition is intended to demonstrate how math modeling can be used to educate and influence society, so the results need to be accessible to the general public. To do that, Ananthakrishnan said, the group “modeled realistic personas that people could relate to and showed the risk and severity of losses for each simulated individual.”

For policy makers, he said, “We also analyzed the effectiveness of different policies to clearly show … the potential impact each could have in reducing risk."

According to Covers.com, the total amount Virginians have spent on sports gambling every year has increased by about $1 billion dollars every year since online sports gambling was legalized in 2021. Virginians spent $7.6 billion on sports gambling last year, with sportsbooks keeping more than 11% of the money spent.

That makes this year’s question a very timely one. “I think society needs to understand the toll a loss can take, and with the online sports gambling industry skyrocketing, it is very important for people to understand its adverse effects,” Sondhi said.