Команда из Индии заняла 11-е место на международном конкурсе математического моделирования

Seventeen-year-old Anshveer Bindra’s laptop crashed. Then it crashed again. He remembers it as one of the more grueling stretches of the five-day sprint during the International Mathematical Modelling Challenge (IM²C) held this year. (Sign up for THEdge, The Hindu’s weekly education newsletter.) Bindra was running the optimisation code his team had built to figure out how to protect a wildlife park in Namibia they had never visited, using data on poaching, wildfires, and tourist traffic that four Indian teenagers had spent days scraping together from open maps and government records. The model was too heavy for his machine to handle. When it finally ran clean, he remembers it as a kind of relief that bordered on disbelief. “It was wonderful how beautifully the entire thing fit together and how it all worked,” Bindra said. “That was a surreal experience.” That five-day sprint, done almost entirely over Zoom calls in March, has now earned Bindra and three teammates, Tanish Kulkarni, Vedansh Saha and Nipun Saha, a Meritorious Award at the International Mathematical Modelling Challenge, placing Team India among the top 11 teams out of 68 from 37 countries. It is one of the strongest results an Indian team has produced at the competition, organised annually by the Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications, also known as COMAP. The team was honored at an award ceremony held at the Harvard Science Center in Boston during a summit that ran from August 5 to 9, where they mingled with other meritorious teams present and toured the campuses of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Only two teams worldwide receive the competition’s top honor, the outstanding award, each year. India’s team placed just below that tier. For a competition that asks teenagers to spend five days turning a real conservation crisis into a working mathematical model, the achievement is notable less for the medal than for what it represents, according to their mentor, Sagar Srivastava, a postdoctoral research associate at Iowa State University who has coached the students for more than two years. “What Indian students lack is not the talent but the opportunity,” Mr. Srivastava said. “This was one of the few times an Indian team was meritorious in a competition at the level of IMMC. But now that we are aware of such things, I do hope we’ll have a lot more participations coming from India.” A park half the world away, mapped from a bedroom This year’s challenge asked teams to build a risk management model for Etosha National Park, a reserve in Namibia spanning more than 900 square kilometers, and to figure out how conservation authorities should deploy limited resources, including rangers, drones and satellites, against three converging threats: poaching, wildfires and conflict between tourists and wildlife. None of the four students had studied ecology or environmental science before. Kulkarni, 16, an 11th grader at Bharati Vidyapeeth Rabindranath Tagore School of Excellence in Pune who wants to pursue mathematics and physics, said that gap turned into one of the project’s central lessons. “I never thought I would enjoy mathematical modeling with biology or ecology,” Kulkarni said. “It was a lesson that mathematics and mathematical modeling is not just limited to mathematics and the pure sciences. It extends to biology, ecology, economics, absolutely anything really.” The team pulled the park’s geography from OpenStreetMap, an open-source mapping platform, then broke it into a grid so each section could be scored for risk. Water holes, they found, mattered most: animals gather there, which draws poachers, and it is also where most tourist-wildlife encounters occur. To weigh which species needed the most protection, the team cross-referenced their model against the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of threatened species, and tracked down Namibian government budget documents, not easily found, to estimate how much money the park actually had to work with. Bindra, a 12th grader at Oberoi International School in Mumbai, led most of the programming, drawing on experience he had built through earlier competitions. Kulkarni worked alongside him on the code and the underlying mathematics. Nipun Saha and Vedansh Saha, two other students focused heavily on ideation and on writing the technical report, a document the team ultimately typeset in LaTeX, a system commonly used for scientific publishing, running to more than 3,000 lines of underlying code by the time they were done. “We kind of split the work up based on how good we are at each thing,” Bindra said, describing days spent almost entirely on video calls, trading code files and research links. When the math stopped being convex The team’s first attempt at a model, Bindra said, was deliberately simple, and it had a mathematical property he described as convex, meaning there was a single, provably optimal solution. It also left out too much of what actually happens inside a national park. So the team kept adding variables like the varying reach of a ranger on foot across different terrain, the different response times satellites and drones offer compared with people on the ground and the way risk shifts by season. Once they did, the model became what mathematicians call non-convex. There was no longer a guarantee that the solution they found was the best one possible, only that it was a strong one. “We were unable to show that this is the most optimal solution,” Bindra said. “There could also be more optimal cases that our model could converge to. However, we weren’t able to reach that because we didn’t know.” The team used an optimisation method called gradient descent, which Bindra compared to a ball rolling downhill until it settles into a valley. That valley became their answer, not necessarily the lowest point on the entire landscape, but the best one they could find and defend within five days. Kulkarni said defending those choices, rather than the polish of the final numbers, is what set the team apart in a field of 68 entries. “The way we justified our model” made the difference, he said, pointing to the team’s treatment of park rangers as a specific example. Unlike satellites, which can watch a location but not act on what they see, rangers can respond to a threat, but only within a radius shaped by terrain that changes across the park. Modeling that trade-off in detail, and backing it with sensitivity and stability analysis, became what Kulkarni called one of the strongest parts of the submission. A mentor’s long game Mr. Srivastava did not recruit the students for this competition. They came to him. He had already spent more than two years training a cohort of roughly 40 students selected through the Lodha Genius Program, a fully funded initiative at Ashoka University, in a “holistic” mix of pure and applied mathematics, preparing some for the International Olympiad in Mathematics and others for ETEAM, the European Team Mathematics Challenge for young mathematicians, where Srivastava has also served as team leader. Mr. Srivastava argues that competitions like this matter less for the trophy than for what he calls the toolbox students walk away with. He points to Kulkarni’s interest in physics and Nipun Saha’s interest in computation as places where mathematical modeling could resurface years from now, in quantum mechanics problems or in modeling computer networks. “Modelling is just becoming a tool,” Mr. Srivastava said. “It’s not just the competition, it’s the whole journey.” He is now in touch with COMAP about running a broader version of the program across India, betting that the bottleneck for Indian students in competitions like IMMC has never been ability. “In India, we have a lot of talent,” he said, “and most of this talent goes, it just gets buried.” Beyond the medal For Bindra, who had been leaning firmly toward a math major before this year, the experience complicated a plan he thought was settled. Watching mathematics operate inside a conservation problem, rather than staying confined to physics or pure theory, left him more open to where that path might lead. “I did know for certain that I was going to do something in math and physics,” he said. “And now I am keeping an open mind.” Kulkarni, who has also competed in the International Cybersecurity Olympiad and ETEAM, said what stayed with him most from Boston was not the ceremony itself but conversations with the eight other meritorious teams present, each of which had approached the same Etosha National Park problem differently. “That sort of also reflects their mathematics education, how their education system works, how they are taught to think about modeling challenges,” he said. “This multicultural interaction aspect is what allowed me to gain a lot of exposure and perspective to what mathematics is like around the world.” (Danish Pandit is a journalist and a documentary filmmaker based in Delhi. Hanan Zaffar is a journalist covering tech environment and AI. He is based in New Delhi.) Published - September 04, 2026 08:30 am IST