Rockville Students Named Runners Up in Math Competition

A global pandemic didn’t stop a group of Richard Montgomery High School students from coming together to participate in an international math competition. A combination of math smarts and creative thinking has added up to a top spot for the team, whose work was selected as one of the best solutions to the problem of how to make internet access available to everyone.

The students – Alexander Karbowski, Jerry Shen, Danesh Sivakumar, Tony Wu, and Junzhi Xie of Rockville-based Richard Montgomery High School – advanced to the finals in MathWorks Math Modeling (M3) Challenge, a unique competition that drew more than 2,400 11th and 12th graders in the U.S. and sixth form students in the U.K. this year. The team, whose work underwent intense scrutiny by judges in the first two rounds of assessment, endured one last hurdle on April 26 where they presented their findings virtually to a panel of professional mathematicians for final validation and, ultimately, placed second among the Technical Computing teams.

Using mathematical modeling, students had 14 consecutive hours in late February and early March to come up with a solution to a real-world issue: defeating the digital divide to make internet accessible to all. The M3 Challenge problem asked teams to create a model to predict what internet connectivity will cost over the next decade, how minimum required bandwidth should be determined, and an optimal way to distribute cellular nodes in a region to maximize access. A total of 535 teams submitted papers detailing their recommendations.

“This year's topic touches on several relevant issues we are facing as a global community,” says M3 Challenge director of judging and lead problem developer Karen Bliss, Virginia Military Institute. “One is the social justice aspect of internet access. While this has been a problem for years, the pandemic has highlighted the reality of the digital divide: those who don't have fast, reliable internet are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to access to education and the ability to work from home, among many other things.”

Since there are so many ways to access the internet (cable, fiber optic, cell phones, public Wi-Fi), it's not obvious how to best solve this problem. “We asked students to think about how needs vary from person to person and how to best get high-speed internet to rural, suburban, and urban areas. While there's no one mathematical approach that is the right way to answer these questions, we look forward to seeing how the students used mathematical modeling to reach an answer and explain how what they value shows up in their models,” Bliss says.

Now in its 16th year, M3 Challenge is a program of Philadelphia-based Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (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.

In addition to Richard Montgomery High School, the two other Technical Computing finalist teams hail from high schools in Hillsborough, California and Osprey, Florida.

“Our team is truly passionate about learning and applying what they have learned in math class. This year, despite the COVID-19 restrictions, our team was able to maintain excellent leadership and communication with each other,” says coach Warren Wilkerson. “They managed to teach underclassmen the importance of including all aspects of a mathematical model into a written paper, while also being as simple as possible. It is clear the students on this team demonstrate a personal drive to explore the diverse fields in math and M3 Challenge was a perfect way for them to use their skills. It was truly a joy to work with the team!”

Team member Jerry Shen found M3 Challenge to be unique among other math competitions, and fun too. "For us, M3 Challenge represented a great way for us to exercise our teamwork and problem-solving capabilities. We learned about how the fields of math and computer science intersect to allow us to solve problems like the broadband issue we encountered in this year’s problem. Beyond this, exploring this problem truly forced us to think in diverse and creative ways that aren't taught within the classroom. We look forward to applying these skills beyond this challenge as well!"

For the second year running, all presentations and judging took place virtually instead of at an all-day, in-person event in New York City due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

For more information about M3 Challenge, visit m3challenge.siam.org.

To access this year’s challenge problem, visit https://m3challenge.siam.org/practice-problems/2021-challenge-problem-defeating-digital-divide-internet-costs-needs-and-optimal.