Karen Lee

Senior Jason Hao’s group discusses how to solve the math problems for the Jane Street Estimathon, which was hosted on Dec. 4 by the Varsity Math Team (VMT). “I normally go to VMT as my main club,” Hao said. “[The contest] went very well for my team, because we got first [place]. I think it was really fun.”

On Dec. 4, Jefferson’s Varsity Math Team (VMT) hosted the Jane Street Estimathon in collaboration with Jane Street, a quantitative trading firm in finance. An Estimathon is a team-based contest where participants attempt to guess the correct numerical answer to a mathematical problem. 

With several teams of students competing, the Estimathon was an opportunity for students to have fun while doing math. 

“This is the first time in recent years that Jane Street has done [an] Estimathon [at Jefferson],” junior VMT historian Michelle Zuo said. “I think it’s a fun way to get everyone involved [and] more people to participate in activities related to math.” 

The Estimathon can teach valuable lessons to students on problem-solving effectively under pressure.

“Having [the] ability to determine [which] parts to focus on in complex or fast moving situations can be very valuable,” Jane Street trader and Estimathon moderator Andy Niedermaier said. “The Estimathon is 30 minutes; it goes by very quickly. It’s possible [that] if [you] are not familiar with it, you end up prioritizing minute details that don’t have a big impact on your final score. People who have played at least once or twice have a much better understanding of how to spend their time and organize as a team, preventing themselves from falling into some of these traps.”

Dividing up the work, Jefferson students hustled to solve the many problems as accurately as possible. 

“[We divided] up the problems based on who knew what. One of my friends knew a lot more about basketball than the others and [another] one of our friends [who was] into number theory took one of the problems [and] he actually calculated the answer,” senior Jason Hao, one of the students on the winning team, said. “It’s pretty cool that there are some math elements, but it’s also just random trivia. There is a bit of everything.” 

While Jane Street hosts math contests created for high school students, such as the Carnegie Mellon Math Tournament and American Regions Mathematics League (ARML), it is uncommon for them to host the contests at a high school. 

“Jefferson is kind of an outlier among high schools,” Niedermaier said. “We have a dedicated group of people within our recruiting team that tries to work with either schools or conferences. We do these more often at universities for undergraduates.”

One of the reasons why Jane Street hosts these kinds of math contests at schools is to show students what the world of finance actually looks like. 

“We want people to know that finance isn’t this really boring thing where people wear suits all day and work on PowerPoint presentations—which was [my perspective] when I was in graduate school,” Niedermaier said. “There is this team based dynamic that can be a lot of fun. When a model or a problem that you are working on is actually doing trades and positive expectancy things, that can be really thrilling to see happen.”