Another year, another HiMCM challenge — are you ready?
What is HiMCM
The High School Mathematical Contest in Modeling (HiMCM) is a prestigious competition that has been known to strengthen college applications. Its high value and international prestige means that winning an award in this contest could highly boost your chance of getting into a top university in the US.
In HiMCM, students are asked to use mathematical modelling and programming to solve real-life problems presented by the contest and produce an essay. This contest is a great challenge for student’s flexible application of math knowledge, but it is also highly rewarding.
From the recent three-year early admissions results, it’s not hard to see that almost all team members who won an “honorable mention” or above in HiMCM are admitted to Top 30 universities in the US. The highest award of the contest — Outstanding — is given to less than 1% of the participants. Those with this award can have their works published in authoritative academic journals in the US, and it’s safe to say they can almost certainly secure an offer from top schools.
This past year’s HiMCM questions were very interesting, and much more challenging than regular math problems. Students can pick either to work on. Let’s check them out!
Problem A
Most high schoolers are probably not so familiar with the theme in Problem A: planning your 2021 summer job. If you don’t think it’s that related to math, take a closer read of the prompt. There are so many factors that would affect your choice of work: distance from home, commute, working hours, wage, work style and so on. All of these could be quantified in one way or another to build a math model, so that we could rank these job choices.
Going deeper, some of these listed factors are quantitative while some are qualitative. Some are constants while some are variables; some have a fixed chance of happening while some are random. It’s a massive challenge to build a reasonable math model that takes all these different factors with varying qualities and weights into consideration.
In addition, the problem also requires participants to take at least 10 people on which to apply the model and conduct analysis. This demonstrates that merely working on paper would not be enough to build a convincing model — only through experimentation and sample analysis could participants build a scientific math model that meets all academic requirements.
Problem B
Problem B asks students to build a model that could help decide the best investment options to protect biodiversity and endangered species. This is a heavy but highly realistic topic. In recent years, more and more species are becoming endangered, which greatly harms biodiversity. It’s urgent for people to take action and protect them.
However, available funds are very limited and these projects are long-term processes, which means very few species actually receive protection funding. Under these circumstances, participants need to help the Florida Rare Plant Conservation Endowment (FRPCE) pick a suitable animal protection project to fund.
This problem provides participants with the protectability, uniqueness, likelihood, historic investments and other data on 48 species protection projects. This demands participants to have superb data analysis skills At the same time, participants need to rank their suggestions on the priority of these projects through modelling, and they need to be able to elaborate on their analysis and results.
Comparing the two problems
Compared with Problem A, Problem B would be more limiting, but it’s a more serious topic. Problem A demands more imagination and research abilities from the participants, but its flexible conditions and ways of analysis suit most participants.
Problem B limits the range of datasets available for analysis, but it requires more logical thinking and evidence from the participants to back their conclusions, which poses a bigger challenge to their data analysis abilities.
You can choose which prompt is more suitable based on your mastery of mathematical knowledge and your own strengths. No matter which one you pick, there are strict requirements when it comes to essay writing formats. The essays should be no longer than 25 pages, and must include the following:
- One-Page Summary Sheet
- Table of Contents
- Your complete solution
- Reference list
Therefore, building up a team, dividing work and checking formats in a short period of time are all very important to winning the competition.
Does this competition sound appealing to you? Do you want to try out more math modeling contests like this? You should start planning for next year’s competitions right now, and stay tuned for more Thinktown content on competition-related topics!
