Both High School North and High School South received honorable mention and a $1,”000 team prize in Moody’s Mega Math Challenge 2008. Coaches were Tim Cornell and Carol Reichmann. More than 250 teams of high school juniors and seniors from southern New Hampshire through northern Delaware competed by submitting solution papers that attempted to solve the replacement of gasoline with ethanol.##M:[more]##
North students included Sir Aharon, Peter Maa, Joshua Sung, Jason Steinberg, and Logan Maingi. South students included Ian Frankel, Lingfeng Zhou, Kevin Gu, Mensong Li, and Chih-Hsuan Wu.
The competition, “Energy Independence Meets the Law of Unintended Consequences,” called on student teams to discuss issues associated with increased corn-derived ethanol production and fuel substitution. They were required to relate these matters to dramatic and unanticipated rises in farm commodity pricing, the future of food supplies in developing nations, the effect on carbon-dioxide emissions, and the cost-effectiveness of producing ethanol fuel. Teams quantified these concerns using mathematical modeling techniques, developed and defended their models, and justified their conclusions.
