Students take part in MathWorks Math Modelling Challenge

News - Mar 13

Recently, five Year 12 students were part of the Colyton team that entered the ‘MathWorks Math Modelling Challenge’, an annual internet based intensive mathematical modelling competition which is designed to motivate students to study and pursue careers in applied mathematics, computational science, data science and technical computing. This competition is run by the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), which is headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  

643 teams from across the UK and the US took part, working on this year’s problem entitled ‘A Tale of Two Crises: The Housing Shortage and Homelessness’. They were challenged to use mathematical skills, research and brainstorming to evaluate data, develop models, and propose answers about the future of housing availability and costs and the growing number of unhoused people.  

Teams had to then submit their solutions – including an executive summary of their findings written in the form of a brief to the government – within 14 hours of downloading the problem, replicating the tight deadlines often demanded in the real world .The students’ submissions will be assessed by an international panel of Ph.D. – Level mathematicians, where winning teams split a share of $100,000 worth of scholarships.  

Whilst we cross our fingers from our Colyton team can share part of the prize money, regardless of the outcome, we can be so proud of the students who take part. They chose a working window of 7am-9pm, and whilst this seems like such a long time, the 9pm deadline came far quicker than they had anticipated. It is no mean feat to work on anything for 14 hours straight, let alone a huge open-ended problem like trying to tackle homelessness (especially the Monday after Ten Tors!). They had to deal with numerous challenges along the way with their models not always giving reasonable results. They truly can say that they know the meaning of teamwork and working under pressure. 

A huge congratulations to our team: Joshua A, Euan B, Alice K, Jack N and Raffaele A.