REGION — A team of Canyon Crest Academy students is preparing to head to the Big Apple at the end of this month after becoming finalists in a recent international online math competition.
The students – Michelle Liang, Evan Luo, Jonathan Xue, Larry Wu and Stephen Zhu – worked together for 14 straight hours in early March for the MathWorks Modeling Challenge (M3 Challenge), a competition that drew in nearly 3,000 junior and senior high school students across the United States and United Kingdom this year.
Thanks to math smarts and creative thinking, the Canyon Crest students earned a spot as one of nine finalist teams whose submission was selected as one of the best solutions to address the affordable housing and homelessness crises that are gripping communities globally.
“The cost of housing in the U.S. and the U.K. has increased faster than people’s incomes, making rent or mortgage payments challenging for many,” said Karen Bliss, senior manager of education and outreach at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). “This issue is often due to a shortage of available housing, which has reached crisis levels and has been associated with a significant increase in homelessness in many large cities.”
Using mathematical modeling, students had to come up with solutions to the following real-world questions:
- How can society solve the intertwined crises of homelessness and a shortage of affordable housing – especially when they are often exacerbated by unforeseen circumstances such as natural disasters, humanitarian crises and economic downturns?
- How can society predict the long-term changes in the housing supply and unhoused population?
- How can society use this information to create long-term solutions for homelessness?
“Stable housing can ease homelessness and is often an important first step in helping people tackle other challenges like addiction, mental health issues, and unemployment, but increasing the housing supply is slow and requires significant financial investment,” Bliss explained. “There are also other complex issues to consider, such as land restrictions, population growth, financial constraints, and longevity of a housing structure.”
The Canyon Crest Academy team, whose work underwent intense scrutiny by judges in the first two rounds of assessment, has one last hurdle when they head to New York City on April 29 to present their findings to a panel of professional mathematicians for final validation.
A total of 643 teams submitted papers detailing their recommendations. Roughly 45% of those submissions included technical computing to support and enhance their solutions, and those coding skills make them eligible for additional scholarship prizes.
Winning teams will be awarded a share of $100,000 in scholarships total, with the champion team receiving $20,000.
Now in its 19th year, M3 Challenge is a program of Philadelphia-based SIAM and is sponsored by MathWorks. It spotlights applied mathematics as a powerful problem-solving tool and motivates students to consider further education and careers in applied math, computational and data sciences, and technical computing.
“MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge is a fabulous opportunity for students to apply deep mathematics to relevant situations. It is the only competition that has students think and act like professional mathematicians in the workforce,” said Brian Shay, mathematics professor and the team’s coach. “By having students work in a small group, immerse themselves into one large problem, and explore how math can be used to make sense of the problem, they see how math can be applied to all aspects of life. M3 Challenge helps us to teach our students that communication of technical information is as essential as the accuracy and content of the information.”
Team member Luo said that he found M3 Challenge to be a unique competition that offers valuable insights into the practical applications of mathematics and effective communication.
“MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge has given my team new insights on the use of mathematics and statistics. Unlike other competitions, where the concept of math seems vaguely applicable to the world around us, M3 Challenge has built a competition where we can take real data and apply our ideas to real problems, all in a fun environment,” Luo said. “As a team during those 14 hours, we learned to problem solve as a group, conduct research and articulate our thoughts into solutions.”
In addition to Canyon Crest Academy, the other finalist teams hail from schools in Alexandria, Virginia; Andover, Massachusetts; Basking Ridge, New Jersey; Elmhurst, Illinois; Gainesville, Florida; Livingston, New Jersey; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Watford, Hertfordshire in England.
