Students Tackle Math Competition

By Melody Perry

Capital’s best and brightest math students competed in the COMAP High School Math Modeling Competition the last weekend before Thanksgiving break. Over the course of two days, competitors worked in eight teams of four to complete a technical math problem.

“It’s an open-ended problem. A little different than anything you’ve done in high school.” Says Mr. Peterson, one of the coaches of the math club. “They’re big problems, like make an airport or make a ski resort.”

After becoming National Champions last year and placing second in the COMAP International Competition the year before, Peterson is confident the team can do it again.

The Paw Print met with two of the competitors, Ethan Davidson (Senior) & Peter Lund (Senior) during a break on day two of the competition and got their view on the event. They explained that students should join Math Club to gain access to the all the math competitions, and while the competitions are not required, it’s strongly encouraged. The COMAP High School Math Modeling Competition is their first big competition of the year.

Lund says. “[The competition is] always a fun thing to do. You get out of school for two days and you get to go and hang out in the library. I mean, you bash your brains on these things,“ Lund laughs, “But it’s a lot of fun.”

Davidson tells us about the competition itself: “There’s two problems. You chose one or the other. On the first day you look at whichever one you want to do, and you pursue that problem.” Giving an example from last year, he explains further, “One of the problems in last year’s competition was to design a drone light show like they did for the super bowl a few years ago. You had to know how to make graphs with all types of functions so that you could create the shapes you wanted in the air. That frustrated some people.”

Lund elaborates on that particular challenge: “One of the shapes you had to draw was a dragon. The dragon was quite a challenge as you can imagine. For one of the groups, they came up with this beautiful picture with fire coming out of its mouth. It was majestic as can be. One groups project came out looking like a snake,” he says, chuckling.

“Depending on which problem,” Davidson says, “you may have to do some drawing, but for every problem you do have to do a lot of typing. There are fairly limited requirements for creating your paper explaining what you did, but the best papers are those that are very thorough and go through a lot of effort making sure that the person reading it understands the reasoning”

Essays can reach up to 25 pages, and that’s not including the graphs and appendix.

If you’re interested in math competitions such as these or Math Club in general, visit Mr. Peterson in room 208 on Fridays at lunch.

Photo Credit: Melody Perry

Ethan Davidison and Peter Lund take a break from the competition.