Five Students Place Third in Unique National Competition

Five Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, students have figured out the formula for excelling in a national championship. The group placed third in a one-of-a-kind national math competition, rising above thousands of other students for a prize of $10,000 in college scholarships.
The prestigious Moody’s Mega Math (M3) Challenge drew 5,000 eleventh and twelfth graders who were asked to use mathematical modeling to determine the best solutions for issues facing the future of mobility, from carsharing to driverless technologies. A total of $150,000 was up for grabs, divided among the finalist teams and top performers nationally.
Eleventh-graders Michael Wu, Gianna Miggins, and Niyant Narang and twelfth-graders Anna Song and Alexander Ju from Berkeley Heights-based Governor Livingston High School placed third in delivering what was found to be an outstanding mathematical solution to how and where car-sharing companies can flourish in a rapidly-shifting automotive landscape. The students presented their findings at Moody’s corporate headquarters in New York City on Monday, along with five other finalist teams.
Organized by the Philadelphia, PA-based Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and sponsored by New York, NY-based The Moody’s Foundation, the competition attracted more than 1,100 teams of three to five students who put the problem-solving skills they have learned in the classroom to the test – from recommending U.S. markets where automakers should put their car-sharing dollars, to determining the best business models and technologies to help car companies stay ahead of the curve in a highly competitive market that aims to decrease traffic, pollution and oil dependence.
The M3 Challenge – designed to spotlight the relevancy and power of mathematics in solving real-world issues, as well as motivate students to consider further education and careers in math and science – gave participants 14 consecutive hours during the last weekend of February to study the issue in question, collect data and devise models before uploading their solutions online.
“Participating in the M3Challenge has been an exciting and eye opening experience that gave us a taste for career options that involve math,” said ưNiyant Narang of the winning team, adding that the team members bonded as a result of their participation. “What we learned most is how much math is used in the real world and how it can be applied to solve real life problems.” The team was coached by Steven Hess, math teacher at Governor Livingston High School.
Judges serving on the panel to review the final presentations were impressed with the students’ performance and character. “Each of the teams demonstrated an enormous amount of creativity, and that’s something people might not always associate with mathematics,” said Dr. Ben Galluzzo, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Shippensburg University and one of the M3 Challenge judges. “In addition to their creativity, the teams came up with solutions that were made up of much more than numbers – they could actually affect change within a real world problem.