Livingston Teen Math Wizards Advance In Prestigious Competition

LIVINGSTON, NJ — A pandemic didn’t stop a group of Livingston 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,” according to a news release.

The students – Aditya Desai, Sidhant Srivastava, Leo Stepanewk, Edward Wang, and Charles Yu of Livingston 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 Livingston team, whose work underwent intense scrutiny by judges in the first two rounds of assessment, has one last hurdle on April 26 when they present their findings virtually to a panel of professional mathematicians for final validation.

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, organizers stated.

“This year's topic touches on several relevant issues we are facing as a global community,” said M3 Challenge director of judging and lead problem developer Karen Bliss, Virginia Military Institute.

“One is the social justice aspect of internet access,” Bliss said. “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, Bliss said.

“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,” Bliss said. “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.”

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. Winning teams will be awarded a share of $125,000 in scholarships, with the champion team receiving $22,500 in 2021.

In addition to Livingston High School, the five other finalist teams hail from high schools in Johns Creek, Georgia; Lincolnshire, Illinois (two teams); Lincroft, New Jersey; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

“I want to thank M3 Challenge for providing this wonderful opportunity for the students to be challenged with a real-world situation and be able to collaboratively work together, even if on Zoom, to solve the problem and think outside of the box,” coach Cheryl Coursen said. “A few of the students were on the team last year and made it to the top 100. That helped them come back this year knowing more of what they had to do to make it better. The students are so very excited, and we are extremely proud of them and their efforts.”

Team member Sidhant Srivastava found the M3 Challenge to be unique among other math competitions – and fun too.

"We are incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to compete in M3 Challenge and highlight our data modeling capabilities,” Srivastava said. “Although we were nervous at first because of the competition’s open-ended nature, we gained experience through working with our veteran team members on past questions.”

“On the day of the competition, we initially began brainstorming as a group before branching out on specific tasks,” Srivastava said. “Every team member worked to his strengths, whether it was programming a simulation for household bandwidth needs or using calculus to determine optimal cell tower placement. After compiling our final paper, we felt satisfied with our performance.”

“Our team is passionate about interdisciplinary applications of math modeling, and this experience gave us valuable insight into real-world scenarios and a brief glimpse of what potential careers could entail for us, Srivastava added. “We believe that creative problem solving and coordinated teamwork are essential to tackling the complex issues of the future."

For the second year running, all presentations and judging are taking 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 the 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.

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