High School South was awarded $1,”000 scholarship money in Moody’s Mega Math Challenge when its team received honorable mention. Team members include juniors Kevin Gu, Lingfeng Zhou, Chih-Hsuan Wu, Mengsong Li, and Ian Frankel, a senior. Their coach was Carol Reichman, a faculty member at South.##M:[more]##
The teams submitted viable solution papers to this year’s problem, “Energy Independence Meets the Law of Unintended Consequences,” which 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.