Four GHS juniors place in top six percent of international math challenge

On February 28th, a group of GHS students turned on their calculators and got out their graph paper to compete in the MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge. Recently, they were notified that they placed in the top 6 percent of the challenge, and ranked 37th out of the 612 competing teams.

The team nabbed an honorable mention, which was accompanied by a scholarship of $1000.

The MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge, or M3C, is a challenge presented to juniors and seniors in the US, England, and Wales. Schools are allowed to send up to 2 teams of 3-5 students. The teams are given 14 hours to research, code, and write a paper answering the challenge question presented to them. 

Juniors Elijah Sarrouf, Seamus Buckley, Baret Buckley, and Tyler Weed teamed up to complete this challenge. 

“I really valued the experience,” said Seamus Buckley. “It allowed us to take the information and skills we’ve learned from a variety  of different subjects and synthesize it in order to solve a real-world problem.”

This year’s challenge question was titled “Remote Work: Fad or Future”. The full problem can be read here.

“The problem prompted us to project the number of people in select cities that would work from home in the next few years, and predict the effects that it would have on each city,” said Buckley. “Through research, math, and computer science, our team was able to evaluate the environmental and economic impacts that a real-world trend would have on our cities.”

The group plans to compete again next year, with hopes of improving their placing now that they have previous challenge experience.