Mathematicians: Team of Buchholz High students will advance in national math competition
Five Buchholz High School students came together to participate in a mathematics competition and their team has been chosen as a top winner out of over 600 submissions.
The group of local students — Melissa Li, Sophia Rong, Nathan Wei, Andrew Xing and Luke Xue — is one of nine finalist teams in the MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge (M3 Challenge), an international, online math competition that combined mathematical modeling with real-world problems and critical thinking skills.
The team was given 14 consecutive hours to create a solution, with the use of mathematical modeling, to the crises of affordable housing and homelessness — a prominent local and nationwide problem.
A news release shared the 2024 problem: “How do we solve the intertwined crises of homelessness and a shortage of affordable housing, especially given that they are often exacerbated by unforeseen circumstances such as natural disasters, humanitarian crises, and economic downturns? Can we predict long-term changes in the housing supply and unhoused population? If so, how can we use this information to devise real, long-term solutions for homelessness?”
A total of 643 teams submitted papers detailing their recommendations. The Buchholz team’s submission was selected as one of the best solutions to the problem presented.
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About 45% of the 643 submissions included technical computing to support and enhance the teams’ solutions; a news release said those coding skills make the teams eligible for additional scholarship prizes.
Ziwei Lu, the team’s coach, said in a news release that “the open-ended nature of M3 Challenge means there is a lot of creativity required in problem solving, which is rather unique in the realm of high school competitions. The students not only had to apply the skills they learned in math and computer science classes, but also research and understand the background, as well as overcoming challenges like how to project so far into the future.”
In an interview with The Sun, Lu said the team worked from about 9 a.m. to 11 p.m.
"I'm very proud of their accomplishment... It's a lot of effort and it's also a very different competition environment in comparison to, really, almost everything else," he told The Sun. "You don't get a problem until your 14-hour clock starts... It's also a very open-ended problem, so the students have to do all of their research, they have to come up with their model, they have to code, they have to program and project and they have to do all of this stuff in the 14 hours... They're under a lot of the time pressure during the competition itself."
The last two years are the first where teams from Buchholz have been invited to New York for the final stage of the competition, Lu said. Last year, he said, one of the teams was a finalist out of six for the overall competition. This year's team is one of three up for the technical computing award — an award based on the team's mathematical model, or the computer programming model they built and used.
Lu said he has been involved with the math modeling club since its creation at Buchholz, around five years ago. He also teaches mathematics and computer science at the high school.
A news release said team member Melissa Li found the challenge to be an invaluable opportunity for connecting academic knowledge to real-world issues, providing unique insights into the practical applications and efficacy of math modeling.
“Although our school provides AP math and statistics courses, there are no classes that describe the real-world application of math modeling or adequately address the level of analysis necessary for M3 Challenge,” said Li in a news release. “By challenging our team in what can only be described as ‘the Challenge’, I believe we obtained a glimpse into the thrill and wide-reaching utility of math modeling and that has shaped what we want to pursue.”
Nearly 3,000 11th and 12th graders in the U.S. and sixth form students in the U.K. competed in the M3 Challenge this year. A news release said the Gainesville team’s work “underwent intense scrutiny by judges in the first two rounds of assessment.”
The Buchholz High team will travel to New York City on April 29 to present their research to a panel of mathematicians for final validation. Winning teams will get a share of $100,000 in scholarships and the champion team will receive $20,000.
M3 Challenge, which has been around for 19 years now, is a program of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and is sponsored by MathWorks. According to a news release, the competition highlights applied mathematics as a powerful problem-solving tool, motivating students to consider higher education and careers in applied math, computational and data sciences and technical computing.
This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Buchholz High team selected M3 Math Modeling Challenge finalist
