Fourteen hours and a piece of $65,000 on the line. That’s called crunch time with a lot riding on it and thus was the case on an early weekend day last week for a group of five Lyndhurst High School students.
When most high school students would be sleeping, the five entered a computer lab at the high school at 7 a.m. It was not for SAT prep, not for extra credit, but to solve the current event question: Would it be feasible to take 10 percent of the nation’s oil supply and switch it to ethanol?
The five students were taking part in what has become an extremely challenging, competitive and thought provoking contest called the Moody’s Mega Math Challenge, or M3. The competition, started three years ago, is the brainchild of the charitable foundation created by Moody’s Investor Service in cooperation with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
The team was to accept an e-mailed question from Moody’s without any prior knowledge of what was to come. "They sent me all the information last year and I felt even if doing it was just for the experience, it would be a very worthwhile experience," said calculus teacher Ruth Stern. Lyndhurst was one of only 287 teams entered into the competition in the Northeast and one of 10 in Bergen County. No other school was from the South Bergenite coverage area.
Last year, the competition’s question asked teams to properly invest in the stock market, the year before, solve the nation’s social security problems. This year, the group was taken a little off guard. It was a five-pronged question asking about the feasibility of replacing 10 percent of the U.S. oil reliance with ethanol. However, the answer was to be formed in a paper, not only talking about the domestic economic effects, but environmental effects and the effects it would have on foreign markets as well.
"There are so many issues today and these are fitting topics for us because we are the future," said Melissa Young, a returning member of last year’s team and captain of this year’s.
So the team, with just one useful Web site provided by Moody’s, set off to formulate its answer. Amish Gandhi and Ehab Awadalla began to research how ethanol could prove helpful environmentally, but also affect the overall economy and demand for corn domestically and abroad. Will Dybus and Bhoomi Shah both began to weigh the overall advantages and disadvantages and Young began putting it all together as captain. All was done by taking one USB card and switching off, a mechanism that kept the team rolling smoothly throughout the day.
"We had five people and it was broken down into five questions, so we really just split up the duties," said Young.
But it was not all math. The summary to the paper was to conform to the layout of newspaper article, encapsulating their English skills. Science was to be applied to the environmental aspects and a mixture of advanced mathematics and business came in handy when determining the worldwide economics of the ethanol conversion.
With nearly five hours to spare, at about 4:30 p.m., the group hit the send button on a 15-page dissertation of why oil should not be replaced by ethanol. It was titled "Ethanol? How about Etha-Not!" The answer may be surprising, but the group stood by the conclusion.
What they found was not only would it be unfeasible to convert the U.S. vehicle stock to engines that could support Ethanol, the demand would raise prices sky-high and create a severe shortage of corn throughout the U.S. and the world. The final computation by the team determined a gallon of ethanol could cost as much as $6.89.
"You have to use too much land and corn is the hardest crop to grow, it’s susceptible to drought and uses up land, dries the land out very fast," said Dybus. "We found prices and demand of corn would skyrocket. We also had to think ethically, would it be ethical to do this as people are starving in other countries?"
Judging of the teams is an arduous three-step process, in which the panel of judges has no idea who the team consists of as each one is given an ID number. No school or student names are attached to the solution papers when in hand of the judges. In the first stage, or triage phase, the judges dwindle down two-thirds of the papers and eliminate them. The second phase further calibrates the papers and the ranking is narrowed to the 11 top papers. By this time, 10 or more professionally applied doctorate-level mathematicians would have read the papers.
By April 30, the third phase brings in the top six teams to Moody’s Manhattan headquarters for oral presentations of the papers where the teams are ranked and awarded the scholarship money. The Lyndhurst five all feel their paper has made enough of a case of why going green may not be the wisest choice and are confident in making it to the main stage before the judges to earn them a share of the scholarship money.
