Math Club Wins Big at Modeling Competition

“The first part of the problem was to develop a model that would predict internet speeds over the next ten years,” explains Toby Beidler-Shenk. Next, the team worked on “allocating bandwidth to three different families with different needs. Then the third part was about placing cell towers in a region so that they would most efficiently serve the region.”

Toby joined Masterman’s Math Club last year. When the facilitator, Ms. Smith, asked if they wanted to do the competition, it was a last minute decision. Despite the short notice, the team garnered an honorable mention. “This year, knowing we enjoyed it last year, we decided to take more time to prepare.”

Ethan Soloway agrees that “the preparation and the experience of having done it once before definitely helped.”

“There’s a database of past problems,” adds Toby, “so we were looking at those and seeing how we would approach those problems. We’d look at a problem and just start brainstorming what factors could come into play.”

Though fourteen hours may seem like a long time to do math, team member Owen Moss says that it felt like “the fastest fourteen hours of your life. We spent the first hour or so just brainstorming and finding data. This year was about internet connectivity, so we thought about the global implications and why they were asking us about this. Then we started working on the models.”

“This competition isn’t like we’re solving individual problems,” says Ethan, “but more like we’re understanding what variables are important and deciding how to tie them together.”

This process was hard, and often led to setbacks. Owen explains that while “they give you some data, a lot of it is incomplete, and we have to look at historical trends to create future models.” While tackling the second model, the group was using a “totally different scheme of model, and it just wasn’t working. We had to deal with it and went back to the drawing board to figure something out. That happens sometimes.”

Despite the obstacles they faced, the team’s dedication and perseverance eventually placed them among the top six teams.

“I was on my phone and got the email saying congratulations,” recalls Owen. “It was absolutely crazy.”

Toby was similarly surprised by the success. “I felt like it came out of left field. It was unexpected to do that well.”

“I think one of the major contributions to that accomplishment,” he continues, “was our more extensive third model. Last year we didn’t really have time to get to it, but this year Tanay already had code written that could be used as a solution to the problem, and so we were able to find a solution to the problem using something we already had.”

“When I looked back at our models and how they worked,” Ethan says, “I realized that for fourteen hours we came up with some pretty good answers to these problems. Even when we didn’t have the most accurate models, they looked at the important features, and we were really good at explaining our work.”

The M3 competition opens up a world of opportunities by showcasing a side of math that students rarely get to experience in a standard school math course.

“Some people hate math as early as second grade,” remarks Owen, “I think the reason for that is the way it’s taught. This competition shows that math can be used to solve current issues.”

Toby furthers that “the problems aren’t simple. They don’t have one answer. Often the solutions are messy, and you have to be creative.”

A second Masterman team composed of juniors also competed in M3 this year, and did well in preliminary rounds. Ethan suggests that current Masterman students “give it a try. It can be a lot of fun to try an abstract large problem and see what you can do.”

If you’re interested in solving real world problems using math, consider joining Math Club, and if you’re interested in reading the group’s M3 solution, you can check that out here.