Houston's St. John's School math team advances to finals of M3 Challenge, calls competition 'exhilarating'

A group of students from St. John's School in Houston participated in an international online math modeling competition for 14 hours straight in early March.

The team from St. John's; consisting of Ananya Das, Caden Juang, Oliver Lin, Ben Lu and Addison Spiegel; used their mathematical expertise and creative thinking to develop a solution to questions regarding the predicted growth of e-bike use and its impact on society; a press release said. Their submission was selected as one of the best solutions, earning them a spot in the finals of the MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge (M3 Challenge), which drew nearly 3,000 11th and 12th graders in the U.S. and sixth form students from the U.K. this year.

Team member Oliver Lin found the M3 Challenge to be a transformative math experience for him and his team members.

"We all went in loving math to some degree, but 14 hours of pure adrenaline and intense collaboration exposed what that love really meant in an unexpected but exhilarating way," he said.

The competition required students to use mathematical modeling to come up with solutions to real-world questions related to e-bike use, such as predicting how many e-bikes will be sold in the next two years, identifying the most significant factors contributing to e-bike use and sales growth, and quantifying the impact of e-bike use on carbon emissions, traffic congestion and other key factors in a given country or region. Out of the 650 teams that submitted papers detailing their recommendations, the St. John's School team was one of eight finalist teams that advanced to the final round of the competition.

On Monday, the St. John's School team will present their findings to a panel of professional mathematicians for final validation. The winning teams will receive a share of $100,000 in scholarships, with the champion team receiving $20,000 in 2023.

The M3 Challenge is a program of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and is sponsored by MathWorks. Its aim is to highlight applied mathematics as a powerful problem-solving tool and motivate students to consider further education and careers in applied math, computational and data sciences, and technical computing.

In addition to St. John's School, the other finalist teams come from schools in Alexandria, Va.; Berwyn, Pa.; Gainesville, Fla.; Lincolnshire, Ill.; Lincroft, N.J.; Mason, Ohio; and London.

Dwight Raulston, a teacher-coach at St. John's School, expressed his enthusiasm for the competition.

"The opportunity to put math, logic, and programming/coding skills to work on a single, complicated problem in conjunction with other strong, talented students is great,” he said in a press release.

To find out more about the M3 Challenge, visit m3challenge.siam.org. This year’s challenge problem can be found at m3challenge.siam.org/practice-problems/2023-problem-ride-wind-without-getting-winded-growth-e-bike-use.

A full list of finalists, semi-finalists and honorable mention teams can be found at m3challenge.siam.org/node/608.