On April 4, 2023, the team came together for 14 straight hours to participate in an international online math modelling competition.
The team snagged a spot in the finals thanks to a combination of maths skills and creative thinking.
Their submission was selected as one of the best solutions to questions around the predicted growth of e-bike users and its impact on society.
The students – Oles Chaban, Atharv Gupta, Ben Robinson, Alice Sanderson, and Ethan Southward – make up one of the eight finalist teams in the M3 Challenge – a unique competition that drew nearly 3,000 sixth form age pupils from the UK and US to participate this year.
The team’s work underwent intense scrutiny by judges in the first two rounds of assessment.
They now have one last hurdle on April 24, when they present their findings to a panel of professional mathematicians for final validation.
Ben Eastley, Eltham College teacher and coach, said: “Many competitions exist to test student prowess in pure mathematics, sciences, or computing.
“However, there are very few opportunities to integrate these disciplines into a coherent whole with significant time constraints under which teams solve real-world problems.
“M3 Challenge encapsulates the complex reality of practical mathematical modelling in an exhausting 14-hour stretch.
“I cannot recommend it highly enough for students who wish to discover for themselves what can be achieved with judicious use of applied mathematics.”
Team members Oles Chaban and Ben Robinson found M3 Challenge to be an exhilarating math experience that reinforced their passion for mathematics.
They said: “M3 Challenge has provided us with an unrivalled opportunity to develop skills when applying mathematical content to new situations.
“This has opened our eyes to the global impact that mathematical modelling can incur, something which is not stressed enough in the standard school curriculum.
“It was energizing to see how concepts we’d learned in the classroom could be used in real-world problems and it motivated us to pursue our mathematics studies with renewed diligence and enthusiasm!”
Now in its eighteenth 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 £75,000 in scholarships, with the champion team receiving £16,000 in 2023.
Using mathematical modelling, students had to come up with solutions to real-world questions such as: “How many e-bikes will be sold in the next two years?
“Of the many factors that contribute to e-bike use and sales growth, which are most significant?
“For a given country or region, can we quantify the impact that e-bike use has on carbon emissions, traffic congestion, or other key factors?”
A total of 650 teams submitted papers detailing their recommendations.
Approximately 45 per cent of those submissions included technical computing to support and enhance their solutions, and those coding skills make them eligible for additional scholarship prizes.
Neil Nicholson, M3 Challenge judge and lead problem developer at the University of Notre Dame, said; “News feeds, magazines, and everyday discussions seem to be filled with talk of ‘the future of the automobile.’
“In the past couple years, though, the rise in popularity of smaller electric personal transportation devices has somewhat changed the conversation.
“While these changes can be meaningful at the individual level, they also are shaping larger scale policy-related questions.
“It is really interesting to see how the modelers attacked these questions, because understanding how the past influences the future will surely provide insight into these big real-world issues.”
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