New Jersey teens win math competition

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NEW YORK, April 27 (UPI) -- Five New Jersey high school students have won scholarships in a competition in which math was used to solve a current U.S. transportation issue, officials said.

The contest drew nearly 5,000 11th- and 12th-graders from the eastern United States who were asked to use mathematical modeling to determine the best regions in the country to revive the Department of Transportation's planned High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail program.

The Mega Math (M3) Challenge was organized by Philadelphia's Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and sponsored by The Moody's Foundation from New York.

Teams of three-to-five students put their math skills to the test to determine the best regions for the rail lines, predict ridership numbers and estimate the cost of implementation and the effect of such a program on foreign-energy dependence, a Moody's release said Friday.

Teams had 14 hours to study the issue, collect data and devise models before uploading solutions online in the form of a research paper.

Five students from Lincroft, N.J., High Technology High School -- Vineel Chakradhar, Stephen Guo, Daniel Takash, Angela Zhou and Kevin Zhou -- were found to have come up with the most sound mathematical solution to the proposed new high-speed rail program.