Maureen Dinnie
Reporter
On Sunday March 7th, members of the junior and senior Moody’s Math Team worked for fourteen hours at the Moody Mega Math Challenge. The winners were announced April 12th, and our Moody’s Math Team walked away as one of the thirty-one teams with an honorable mention and a $1,000 check.
Moody’s Corporation, one of the leading financial firms on Wall Street sponsors Moody’s Mega Math Challenge and works with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) to create the competition. The teams are given a math, economics, or science related question that our society is focused on today, and the teams must create a solution. This year’s question focused on a more efficient way to collect data for the yearly census.
Team members cannot prepare for the Moody’s Mega Math Challenge because they don’t see the question until the day of the challenge. “You can’t do anything to prepare until the day of the competition, so we put a great focus on creating a cross section of different abilities on the team,” Mathematics Department Head Jennifer Lee said. “Each student has strengths in math, science, economics, and overall academic ability.”
After the Math Department goes through the process of choosing team members, the team must work fluidly to create the best solution possible while in the competition. On this year’s team were seniors Alex Bloedel, Siddharth Deshpande, Stephanie Havens, Fabian Hough, and Peter Huff, and they were accompanied by math teacher Attila Levai. Juniors Kimmy Glerum, Brant Hoffman, Izzy Meckler, Amanda Milunovich, and Portia Schultz also competed.
After the competition, team members indicated that they felt their work was well received. “As a member of the junior team, it’s great to see the representation for our school as one of the thirty-one honorable mention teams,” junior Kimmy Glerum said. “They definitely deserved it.”
