Four seniors from Arizona College Prep High School had just finished 14 straight hours of difficult math calculations and submitted their results with 60 seconds to spare before the deadline.
They checked their results immediately after turning them in – and didn’t like what they saw.
“After we submitted it, we noticed a lot of errors,” Rishi Malatkar said. “We’re like, ‘there’s no way we’re going to get top six, right?’”
“That’s the thing I like about this group,” said their teacher, Jonathan Thompson. “They’re humble.”
The Arizona College Prep High team finished in the top six of an international math competition that included 770 teams from the United States and United Kingdom. They will travel to New York City on April 27 to learn where they placed in that top six.
The sponsors will be awarding $100,000 in scholarships in 37 prizes. The team that wins the overall competition will share a $20,000 scholarship.
Joining Rishi on ACP’s team are Akil Gopinath, Varun Sunku and Vishnu Tailor.
This year’s MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge (M3) was to answer these 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? 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?”
Each team had 14 hours after getting the questions to build their models and come up with answers.
And yes, they had to show their math.
“We knew it would be tough,” Akil said. “It definitely brought us closer together.”
“Obviously, 14 hours is a long time sitting down and just doing math,” Varun said. “Mentally, it’s also very hard, thinking about all these complex formulas. More than the physical aspect, the mental aspect was also very challenging.”
These were different kinds of math questions. In most math, 2+2 equals the same number for everyone. But in this case, 770 teams were trying to prove, through math, their arguments on sports gambling.
“There’s not one solution to the problem,” Vishnu said. “It’s basically theoretical. You have to do different calculations, build models and do it in a short time frame. We had a 29-page paper and we had to build three models to answer key assumptions to our paper with strengths and weaknesses for each question. That really took a toll.”
After 14 hours of doing the math, the conclusion they came away with is that sports gambling is a losing proposition.
“When we were running our models and it was giving us results. We could literally see the exact amount of money that if you had put it in a savings account vs. if you gambled it. If compounded over time, you would have like 33% more in savings instead of gambling,” Rishi said.
The teens admitted putting money in a bank account and watching it compound for decades is not as thrilling as betting on a game. They suggested gambling is fine as long as you set limits and know going in that you’re likely to lose it and you’re just doing it for the entertainment value.
Thompson, their teacher, said learning that lesson at such a young age has great value.
“I see more and more students kind of dabble, right?” he said. “Gambling is going to become bigger and bigger and bigger, and it’s hard to get away. The more information they have now to make better decisions, it’s a win-win.”