Lincroft Students Advance To Finals In International Math Contest

LINCROFT, NJ - Five Lincroft high school students are slated to compete in the final round of the international MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge (M3 Challenge) later this month.

High Technology High School teammates Michael Gao, Amanda Guan, Kevin Guan, Amanda Lin and Kevin Liu are only one of eight teams to participate as finalists in the international online math modeling competition. The competition initially drew around 650 teams across the U.S. and U.K.

For this year’s competition, students had to come up with solutions to real-world questions, such as: 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?

The Lincroft team, whose work underwent scrutiny by judges in the first two rounds of the challenge, will be presenting their findings to a panel of professional mathematicians for final validation on April 24.

"News feeds, magazines, and everyday discussions seem to be filled with talk of ‘the future of the automobile,’” M3 Challenge judge and lead problem developer Neil Nicholson, of the University of Notre Dame, said in a statement. “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."

Winning teams of the M3 Challenge will be awarded a share of $100,000 in scholarships, with the champion team receiving $20,000 in 2023. Other finalist teams hail from schools in Alexandria, Virginia; Berwyn, Pennsylvania; Gainesville, Florida; Houston, Texas; Lincolnshire, Illinois; London, England; and Mason, Ohio.

“M3 Challenge is a special opportunity for students to study and analyze current real-world phenomena that have wide ranging impacts on society,” High Technology teacher-coach Raymond Eng said in a statement. “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...

M3 Challenge is a new experience for students where there is not a definitive answer. The real-life lesson is how to construct a logical model on the readily available and incomplete information to support a projection of future human behavior, a near impossible task. The team must also objectively examine the strengths and weaknesses of their model and communicate their results in a very limited amount of time. The team gets to experience what an analyst must deal with in the real world.”