Nashua Math Team Heads To Nationals

NASHUA, NH — Five students from the Academy for Science and Design are heading to New York City this month to compete in national finals in a major math competition. The students will compete for scholarships against five other schools in the MathWorks Math Modeling (M3) Challenge. Only six out of 875 schools in the United States were chosen to compete in the finals.

The Nashua students — Denver Blake, Daniel Bujno, Ian Coolidge, Frederick Lee and Nathan Yeung — will have to use a combination of math smarts and creative thinking to win the top spot in the finals, taking place April 29. This year, the M3 Challenge drew participation of more than 4,000 11th- and 12th-grade students from across the United States. About 35 scholarship prizes totaling $100,000 are up for grabs this year. The winning team will receive $20,000.

To make it into the finals, students underwent a 14-hour challenge in February: to create a mathematical model to predict the spread of nicotine use due to vaping over the next 10 years and to compare vaping to cigarette use. The students then had to build a second model to simulate the likelihood that an individual will use a given substance, taking into account social influence and characteristic traits. Then, they had to predict how many high school seniors will use substances and to develop a metric to measure the impact of various substances.

"Watching our team both prepare for and participate in the M3 Challenge this year was tremendously rewarding for me," said Academy for Science and Design math teacher Karen Legault, who coached the Nashua students during the 14-hour challenge. "These students worked well together, they divided the work, discussed their findings, challenged each other's ideas, and combined their knowledge of research, mathematics... programming, and communication to create their proposed solution."

Coolidge said his team was honored to be chosen as one of the finalists. He said the 14-hour test was both challenging and fun.

"Instead of simply answering the questions on a test, we had to think creatively about how to build a model to solve a real-world problem," he said.

Other schools competing in the finals include high schools from Illinois, Wisconsin, Maryland, New Jersey and Minnesota. The M3 Challenge is organized by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), based in Philadelphia, and is sponsored by MathWorks.