Watford students in final of international maths competition
The five boys are today presenting their project in New York
A group of students from Watford Grammar School for Boys have reached the final of a prestigious international online mathematics competition.
The MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge drew thousands of students from the U.S. and U.K., with the Watford team being one of nine finalists.
The competition set out real-life problems for which teams were asked to apply maths to overcome challenges and propose solutions.
The submission required the five boys, Neil Nair, Meyer Louka, Dominic De Jonge, Jakub Skop, and Kshitij Tyagi, to analyse the housing supply across different locations of the UK.
Neil Nair, said: "The problem begins with us being given a lot of data across various different metrics in cities in the UK and we're asked three questions."
"Using this data we're asked to gain insight using maths."
From there, the boys were asked three questions through which their mathematical skills would be put into practise, with one question asking them to predict the housing supply in Brighton and Manchester over the course of the next 50 years.
The team was inspired to apply by previous students at their school who had participated in the challenge.
They soon partook in the competition, supported by teachers, who have now flown to New York to support them in the big final.
All five boys told Greatest Hits Radio they grew up with a passion for maths, which broadened their interest in the wider usage of maths, which can be linked to various fields including computer science, physics, or social sciences and economics.
Dominic De Jonge said: "It taught us skills of how to research, how to cite existing works, how to adapt existing techniques to new situations and even if we may not use the exact same methods, that sort of skill is extremely transferable to a lot of other subjects."
Meyer Louka said: "From the beginning of secondary school, you start learning about more advanced concepts and I think that's when people start talking about the beauty of maths, people see it as an art."
"I think that's where you start to potentially see that aspect of it, and that's what drove me away from the more like hedonistic side of 'I'm winning, I'm just good at this' to 'this is actually a really beautiful subject'."
The competition, organised by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and sponsored by MathWorks, aims to promote applied mathematics and inspire students to pursue related fields.
While they are hoping to win, the team already considers itself a winner by having reached the final.
All five boys will soon be taking their maths journey to university, where they intend to apply what they learned through the competition to their studies.