Edison Magnet School Team Takes Top Prize In International Math Challenge

EDISON, NJ — A team of five students from Edison Academy Magnet School took first place in the MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge, an international math competition. The team won $20,000 in college scholarships at the event on Monday.

Sreethan Gangavarapu, Ashwath Ram, Vedaswaroop Kunamneni, Ishan Nagpal and Alexander Poon — all juniors or seniors — were chosen from among more than 3,430 students on 770 teams from the U.S. and U.K. who competed this year. The team was coached by Michelle Gomes, a mathematics teacher at Edison Academy Magnet School.

Now in its 21st year, the M3 Challenge required students to spend 14 consecutive hours in late February and early March using mathematical modeling to analyze a real-world problem.

This year's topic was the personal, societal and financial effects of online and mobile sports gambling. Nine finalist teams from the U.S., England and Wales were selected by an international panel of mathematicians before winners were determined through an eight-week, three-round blind judging process involving 120 professional applied mathematicians.

"It was an amazing experience participating in M3 Challenge, and a lot of fun too," Nagpal said. "I had never written a solution paper with a team prior to competing, so doing this for the first time — and getting to present our results to a panel of amazing judges — really was a once-in-a-lifetime experience."

Nagpal credited the team's classroom preparation for their success. "A lot of the stuff that we're learning in class directly applies to the stuff we talked about in our paper," he said. "I think that's one of the main reasons we were so successful in the Challenge."

Coach Gomes said the win was a proud moment. "As their teacher and coach, it was a tremendous feeling to witness my students prove what they're truly capable of outside of the classroom and win," she said.

The M3 Challenge is a program of the Philadelphia-based Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and is sponsored by MathWorks. More than $100,000 in scholarships were awarded in total this year.

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