Moody’s Mega Math Challenge and Mega Math Workshop took New York City by storm as students demonstrated the importance of math.
Five Houston, Texas students rose above thousands of other students in the prestigious Moody’s Mega Math Challenge for the top prize of $20,000 in college scholarships Monday April 25, 2016, becoming national champions.
Nancy Cheng, Eric Gao, Daniel Shebib, Anirudh Suresh and Margaret Trautner, 12th-graders from Houston-based Saint John’s School, were found to have come up with the most sound mathematical solution to how and where car-sharing companies can flourish in a rapidly shifting automotive landscape. The students presented their findings at Moody’s corporate headquarters in New York City Monday, along with five other finalist teams.
The challenge was held at the Moody’s Headquarter located at the World Trade Center. The challenge drew 5,000 11th- and 12th-graders who were asked to use mathematical modeling to determine the best solutions for issues facing the future of mobility, from car-sharing to driverless technologies.
“Math modeling is a process where you use mathematics to solve sort of open-ended more messy problems, where all the variables might not be known and you might have to make some assumptions about things,” stated Michelle Montgomery, director of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. “It is a process by which you can come to gain some insight about things by trying to quantify the things you do know about.”
The challenge was organized by the Philadelphia-based Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and sponsored by the New York-based Moody’s Foundation. The competition attracted more than 1,100 teams of three to five students, who put the problem-solving skills they have learned in the classroom to the test.
“The challenge has been around since 2006,” stated Montgomery. “The Moody’s Foundation wanted to do an applied-math modeling competition for high school students. The challenge is Internet based and there is one problem that everyone works on in a limited amount of time: 14 hours. The teams can upload up to a 20-page solution paper that is read and assessed by judges through a pretty rigorous judging process. The top papers are identified and the teams come to New York, present and get ranked ordered.”
“Winning the challenge is an incredible, surreal experience and we appreciate the opportunity Moody’s gave us to participate,” said Trautner from the championship team, which was coached by Dwight Raulston, director of curriculum and teacher at Saint John’s School. “We came in with very little experience with math modeling and had to be creative in coming up with a solution without the direction of a teacher or worksheet. We overcame obstacles together as a team.”
A total of $150,000 was up for grabs, divided among the finalist teams and top performers nationally. “The top team prizes are $20,000, $15,000, $10,000 and three $5,000,” added Montgomery. “The next six teams get $1,500 each, and this year we were able to give away 78 honorable prizes and that was $1,000 each. So a total of 90 teams got recognized.”
The first of its kind, Moody’s Mega Math Workshop was also held simultaneously at the High School of Economics and Finance in Manhattan. It was offered free of charge to more than 50 participants from six local high schools in New York City, in hopes of encouraging high school students to consider math- and science-related careers.
“This was an opportunity to introduce math modeling to students who may not even have heard of math modeling,” stated Becky Krener of SIAM. “This went back to our mission in wanting to introduce real-world applications of mathematics to students, especially at a younger age before they get to college.
“We spoke to the school chairs and administrators, and they handpicked students who were good at math but were losing interest and needed something to reengage them. They also tried to diversify the type of students we had there by getting some students who were not that into math and not as interested and introduced math to them in a different way that they have not seen before.”
Naiomy Rangel of the High School of Economics and Finance, Maurice Avery Jr. of Marta Valle High School and Chelsea Vicente of Queens Vocational and Technical High School, who participated in the workshop, were chosen at random to each receive a $1,000 college scholarship. The three were recognized at a ceremony at the Moody’s Corporation World Trade Center headquarters later in the day and attended the ringing of the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange.
“I didn’t realize math could be so fun and entertaining,” said workshop participant Stacey Moronta, a 9th-grade student at New World High School in the Bronx. “This workshop was amazing and really opened my eyes to different ways math can be used. I wish we could do something like this every day.”
Participants in the Moody’s Mega Math Workshop also heard inspirational words from Tim Chartier, associate professor of mathematics at Davidson College and Mathematical Association of America national teaching award winner, about the value of math in everyday life, and from Lindsay Hall, Google software engineer, about some of the cool ways Google uses math behind the scenes.
“It’s a nice partnership,” stated Montgomery. “Moody’s provides the money to do everything—to promote it, to run the judging system, to build the website, to award scholarships—and SIAM has this community of academic people that can do all the problem-solving, writing and assessing. Moody’s comes back in, and they can invite the winners to apply for internships at the organization and hopefully come back some day to work for Moody’s.”
For more information on the Moody’s Mega Math Challenge and how and when to register for the 2017 Math Challenge, visit m3challenge.siam.org.