Fairfax Co. high schoolers compete for $20K in international math competition
A team of high school students from Fairfax County, Virginia, will soon be heading to New York City with the hopes of winning $20,000 for their work in an international math competition.
The students from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology are among six teams that made it to the finals in the MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge.
“We will definitely be very excited,” said Rishabh Prabhu, president of the Virginia team. “We’re going to go in confident and ready to do well.”
Overall, more than 600 teams in the U.S. and the U.K. submitted papers. The object was to lay out various ways lawmakers could potentially monitor and address the dual problems of homelessness and lack of affordable housing.
While the top team gets a $20,000 prize, no one at this point will walk away empty-handed. The team from Thomas Jefferson will get at least $5,000 for making it all the way to the finals.
They will present their findings Monday to a panel of professional mathematicians in New York.
“You can interact with all the other finalists,” said Laura Zhang, another student on the Thomas Jefferson team. “It’s really cool and eye-opening to see how other teams address this issue, since we had our own take on it.”
Using mathematical modeling, the students had to come up with solutions to real-world questions, putting together a 20-30 page paper detailing their process, models and analysis.
Specifically, the students were tasked with studying two major cities in the U.S. — Seattle, Washington, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.goo
They worked on models predicting the housing supply and homeless population and turned their predictions into a public policy tool that lawmakers could use as a guide for where and how affordable housing should be constructed in those cities moving forward.
The students were even told to account for other factors such as a natural disaster or an influx of migrants.
“We brainstorm what models we should use and we collaborate together,” Prabhu said. “We had to adapt our models to fit these different scenarios.”
The competition is a program from the Philadelphia-based Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and is sponsored by MathWorks.
It spotlights applied mathematics as a problem-solving tool and motivates students to consider careers in applied math, computational and data sciences, and technical computing, according to their website.