Three Wuhan University’s undergraduate students received the Outstanding Award in the annual Mathematics Contest in Modelling (MCM). Out of 7,421 international teams of students, only 13 received the Outstanding Award. In addition to the Outstanding Award, teams from WHU also won 19 Meritorious Awards and 72 Honorable Mentions.
As one of the most influential mathematical competitions globally, the Mathematics Contest in Modelling (MCM) is a multiday mathematics competition held annually in the USA. Teams are required to come up with their solution to a practical problem, which includes a discussion and a thorough analysis of the mathematical model of the problem concerned, and it should be presented in the form of a paper within 96 hours.
Three students from WHU, Wang Zhaoqi from Economics and Management School, Yang Hui and Li Yulei from International School of Software received the Outstanding Award in the 2016 MCM. During the competition, they used a mathematical model to analyze the potential effect of cleaning up space junk, comparing it with that of leaving the trash where it is.
The competitive edge of the team lies in their respective strengths: the strong analytical ability Wang attained through systematic training in both economics and mathematics, Li’s programming skills that precipitated the locating of data, and Yang’s proficiency in English writing that helped articulate the complex process of mathematical modeling.
“The three undergraduates formed the team out of shared interest, and gained experience from participating in China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling as well as MCM in the past,” said Assistant Professor Liao Junmin from Economics and Management School, the advisor of their team.
At the beginning of the contest, the three of them disagreed with each other on the selection of the modeling problem. But eventually, they excluded Problem A, a bathtub designing task, for their lack of thermal knowledge and Problem C, a highly demanding data analysis problem, and decided upon Problem B, the space junk problem.
For preparations, they had been reading related literature intensively before the competition, and during the four days of competition, they worked for more than 20 hours each day, staying up late until three in the morning to repeatedly revise their paper. They believed that knowledge and competence had played a more important role in their success than teamwork alone. Applying skills such as programming, data processing, visualization, result analysis and writing to practical use is the biggest challenge.
As junior students in college, they felt exhausted from both the pressure of schoolwork and the MCM competition from time to time, but each member of the team as well as Liao, their advisor, kept supporting each other all the way. “Continuous progress marks the journey I walked through in perseverance”, said Wang.
(Rewritten by Fang Siyuan, edited by Liu Yinglun & Hu Sijia)
