Math modeling is an alternate approach to math taught by Mrs. Burns. Because MAMS students come from all sorts of math backgrounds, Mrs. Burns focuses on more abstract concepts thank wouldn't be found in your average high school class. We cover topics such as number theory graph theory, and so much more. We also focus on modeling problems, creating mathematically sound reasonings to support an idea or solution to a problem. Because of this, we take part in many math competitions, such as MTFC and HiMCM.
MTFC is the biggest and most long-term modeling project we do in math throughout the year. In this project, we are meant to choose a topic with an attached risk, say for example car accidents, and create a math model to find the severity of the risk and possible solutions that include a behavior change, modifying the outcomes, or insurance. The project my group chose is to model the risk of carbon dioxide pollution caused by the war in Israel and Gaza. The PDF to the right shows our project proposal, the first step in completing an MTFC project. Here we had to respond to many questions to prove that our project is viable and we are up to the task of completing it. Along with the proposal, we also had to complete a practice scenario with a premade dataset, showing that we knew how to properly handle data.
HiMCM is a math competition that we compete in early in the year. In this competition, we make groups of 3-4 people and are given 50 hours to create a math model for a problem and write an up to 20 page paper on our methods. For this 50 hours, all school is shut down at MAMS and we are given the whole day to work on these problems. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to post my group's solution to this website as of the date of publishing, the competition has not yet been graded. Instead, I have attached the practice round we completed in preparation for the actual competition. This problem gave us a dataset of hundreds of roller coasters with many different values and we were meant to create an objective rating system for the coasters. Attached is the presentation explaining our methodology when solving this problem.