Two of Godwin’s own math modeling teams have earned a place in the top eight math modeling teams in the nation.

The high scoring teams included Team 6774 (seniors Oliver Hamilton, Shreyas Kulkarni, William Rawson, and Alex Sims) and Team 6779 (juniors William Parker, Kevin Rao, Shaandro Sarkar, and Farheen Zaman).

Students undertaking math modeling competitions are initially presented with a problem and a time limit. The teams must develop a multifaceted solution to the real life extended word problems, write a paper about their approach, and address certain aspects of their solution.

To practice, members of the Godwin math modeling club analyze problems from previous years and compare strategies.  Many math skills used are learned from classes already taken at Godwin.

Senior Shreyas Kulkarni said, “A lot of our planning and organization of problems and solutions stemmed from TPhilly’s advice from last year’s math modeling.  We read the rules a lot and took a lot of breaks in order to make sure we weren’t burnt out.”

Godwin students have the opportunity to compete in three competitions: The Moody Math Challenge, the High School Mathematical Contest in Modeling (HiCMC), and the International Mathematical Challenge (IM2C).

To be able to compete in IM2C in March, teams must first compete in HiCMC in November and rank high enough.

Teams in HiCMC were given 36 hours to successfully complete one of two problems provided.

One problem involved maximizing efficiency of one-day warehouse shipping, and the other involved organizing triathlon waves to reduce congestion on the course.

Team 6779 completed the problem centered around warehouse shipping by mapping warehouses and creating programs to display shipping time maps from UPS.

They earned placement as a National Finalist, one out of four of 411 teams for that problem.

Team 6774 at HiMCM solved the problem regarding the triathlon by combining math modeling techniques and computer programming addressing division size and start times to be one out of five groups of 429 teams to receive the rank of National Finalist and qualify for tIM2C.

Due to satisfactory scoring at the HiCMC, eight Godwin teams qualified to compete.

This contest was completed in March and scores are not yet released.

In the IM2C, only a single problem was offered over the course of a five-day work period. The problem concerned organizing the location of a meeting to increase productivity and decrease jet lag.

Team 6774, Team 6779, and six other Godwin teams that qualified worked to mathematically determine a solution against teams from all over the world.

Kulkarni said, “[Math modeling] can get really stressful sometimes, but otherwise, it is really eye-opening since there aren’t really any wrong solutions, only better solutions.”

Junior Shaandro Sarkar said, “One of the things I really love about math modeling is being able to use all the math that we’ve learned to model a problem and then fix that problem.  You don’t need super complicated multivariable calculus or differential equations to solve the problem; often, we just use basic algebra and arithmetic.”