Huntsville Students Named Finalists in International Math Competition

Over a weekend for 14 straight hours in late February, a group of New Century Tech High School students came together to participate in an international online math competition. A combination of math smarts and creative thinking has added up to a spot in the finals for the team, whose submission was selected as one of the best solutions to the question of whether remote work is a fad or the future.

The students – Ella Duus, Donal Higgins, Alexander Ivan, and Shreyas Puducheri of Huntsville-based New Century Tech High School – advanced to one of the finalist spots for the Technical Computing Scholarship Awards in MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge (M3 Challenge), a unique competition that drew more than 2,700 11th and 12th graders in the U.S. and sixth form students in the U.K. this year. The team, whose work underwent intense scrutiny by judges in the first two rounds of assessment, has one last hurdle on April 25, when they present their findings to a panel of professional mathematicians for final validation.

Using mathematical modeling, students had to come up with a solution to a real-world question: will the shift to remote work last, and to what extent? The M3 Challenge problem asked teams to create a model to predict what percentage of workers’ jobs are remote-ready, and whether an individual worker whose job is remote-ready will be allowed to and will choose to work from home. It also had participants estimating the percentage of workers who will work remotely into the future. A total of 612 teams submitted papers detailing their recommendations. More than a third of submissions included technical computing to support and enhance their solutions, making them eligible for this extra award for those coding skills.

“This year's topic touches on several relevant issues we are facing as a global community,” says M3 Challenge judge and lead problem developer Karen Bliss, Virginia Military Institute. “As a result of the pandemic, many people suddenly shifted to working from home. While they may have initially been unprepared, for many people work from home is the ‘new normal.’ We're at a critical juncture where businesses are deciding whether to allow workers to stay home, go back to the office, or have some hybrid model moving forward. There are many facets to consider, not least of which is the current labor shortage in many fields. It is very exciting to see how teams think about remote work and whether they predict that it is here to stay.”

Now in its 17th year, M3 Challenge is a program of Philadelphia-based Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and is sponsored by MathWorks. It spotlights applied mathematics as a powerful problem-solving tool and motivates students to consider further education and careers in applied math, computational and data sciences, and technical computing. Winning teams will be awarded a share of $100,000 in scholarships, with the champion team receiving $20,000 in 2022.

In addition to New Century Tech High School, the other finalist teams hail from schools in Mequon, Wisconsin; Osprey, Florida; Lincolnshire, Illinois; Winnetka, Illinois; Lincroft, New Jersey; and Watford, England.

“I absolutely love teaching Mathematical Modeling and AP Statistics and when I got M3 Challenge information, I knew that this group of students would love the idea,” says the team’s coach, Clifford Pate. “Three of them are currently in my AP Statistics class and other than their perfect test scores and multiple awards they have already won, they are just a great group. As a magnet high school that offers Computer Science, Engineering and Biomedical strands, we get a lot of smart kids, but the combination of their personalities and attitudes is what makes this group special. I am proud of them for even taking on the challenge, so their success is just further evidence that what we are doing at our school is special.”

Team member Ella Duus found M3 Challenge to be an enriching experience for future mathematicians. "M3 Challenge didn’t just test my team’s mathematical know-how, but our application of essential communication skills and the engineering process while on a time crunch. This experience also afforded valuable insight into what a high-stakes environment in the applied mathematics field may look like. We all found this professional prospect compelling, as the challenge cemented my and teammate Donal’s shared goal of pursuing degrees in computer science, while team members Alex and Shreyas intend to explore data science in the biomedical and medical fields, respectively. M3 Challenge bettered us as mathematicians and team members, clarified our objectives in the technical and mathematical fields, and as the icing on the cake, was very fun!”

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

To access this year’s challenge problem, visit https://m3challenge.siam.org/practice-problems/2022-challenge-problem-remote-work-fad-or-future.

To see the full list of finalist, semi-finalist, and honor mention teams, visit

https://m3challenge.siam.org/sites/default/files/M3%20Winners%202022_complete%20list%20pre%20final%20event.pdf.