Congratulations to our M3 Challenge Team! Of the 877 papers submitted in this year’s MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge, the High Tech team’s paper has been judged to be among the top six overall – they are a finalist! This is a distinguished accomplishment, given the rigorous and intense scrutiny that the final paper endured. The team is guaranteed one of the top six scholarship prizes, ranging from $5,000 to $20,000, when they compete at the end of April.

Senior Eric Chai had this to say:

“The M3 Challenge is significant because it highlights applied mathematics as a powerful problem-solving tool for real-world problems. By participating in the challenge, we were able to gain lots of insight into how math can be applicable to any field. The chosen problems highlight this, as they span a wide variety of topics and require a lot of analytical thinking and problem solving to create robust solutions that truly answer the questions at hand."

Dr. Eng, the advisor and coach followed up with this:

“The M3 Challenge is a real-life experience dealing with a very complex open-ended topical issue. The student team must synthesize a mathematical model from an immense amount of research and incomplete information. This Challenge is a new experience for students where there is not a definitive answer. The real-life lesson is how to construct a logical model on the best available, incomplete information to support a conclusion/ recommendation. As additional information is collected, you frequently test the model and make adjustments to improve the accuracy of the model. This is an on-going continuous process, like weather forecasting.”

Left to Right: Coach Dr. Eng, Jason Yan, Eric Chai, Emily Jiang, Gustav Hansen, and Kyle Lui