Three Lake Ridge Academy students competing in international math competition

NORTH RIDGEVILLE — Three Lake Ridge Academy students are heading to New York City on Monday to compete in a math competition, where they could win $20,000. The team, consisting of senior Eric Shin and juniors Shirley You and Kisen Yao, is one of nine finalists in the MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge (M3 Challenge), which drew competitors from the United States and the United Kingdom. More than 3,430 11th and 12th grade students in the U.S. and sixth form students in the U.K. competed during a weekend in early March to work on the real-life answers to these real-life questions: "Should we be concerned as a society about the growth in online sports gambling? How much total money is being lost to sports gambling in the U.S. and U.K. yearly? How much is too much for an individual to spend on online sports gambling?" "The students came to me a couple of weeks before the competition and asked if they could do it," said Jake Lord, math teacher and math club adviser at Lake Ridge. "I signed them up and they did the rest. I have a lot of students who do well in math class and enjoy math. I rarely have students who do math in their free time for fun. That's what I have with these three." The goal of the M3 Challenge, a program of Philadelphia-based Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and sponsored by Mathworks, is to spotlight applied mathematics as a problem-solving tool and to motivate students to consider further education and careers in applied math, computational and data sciences and technical computing. The students placed sixth place for their paper, winning a $5,000 prize. "I'm very excited for them and they are so proud of themselves," Lord said. "I knew these kids were special and really knew their stuff when it came to math. It's eye opening for me to see how next level they are with math." And Lord, who has been teaching for five years, doesn't know if he will see it again. "I'm very lucky," he said. "I don't know if I'll get to experience anything like this again. They are the most math-focused students I've ever had, 100 percent." Kisen said the M3 Challenge was one of his most valuable experiences and made him change the way he thinks about math. "In a short time, we had to understand a real problem, make our own assumptions, build a model, analyze data and turn all of that into a full report," he said. "The hardest part was not the math itself, it was figuring out how to make reasonable decisions where there was no single correct answer, and how to explain our thinking clearly." Apparently, they got it right. "Most of the time, math competitions felt like they were about finding the one right answer, but the M3 Challenge changed that for me." Winning teams will be awarded $100,000 in scholarships with the champion team receiving $20,000. As far as future plans go, You is undecided, Yao is considering finance or engineering and Shin wants to study math theory in college with hopes of one day becoming a professor. Contact Christina Jolliffe at ctnews@chroniclet.com.