For 14 straight hours in early March, a small group of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology students came together to participate in an international online math competition.
The students – Rishabh Chhabra, Om Gole, Rishabh Prabhu, Laura Zhang, and Victoria Zhang of Alexandria-based Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology – make up one of the nine finalist teams in MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge (M3 Challenge), a unique competition that drew nearly 3,000 11th and 12th graders in the U.S. and sixth form students in the U.K. this year. The team, whose work underwent intense scrutiny by judges in the first two rounds of assessment, has one last hurdle when they head to New York City on April 29 to present their findings to a panel of professional mathematicians for final validation.