Mary O'Brien's Website

Math modeling with Mrs. Burns is a challenging class to describe. Sometimes, we learn new topics or review old ones through problem sets meant to encourage us to figure out the topic for ourselves. The focus of this class is on the use of math to model real life and solve problems that connect different areas of math. In order to do this, we complete Problem of the Weeks and participate in math modeling competitions. While the actual content of math may vary, one thing remains the same throughout the course, we collaborate and learn together. Scroll down to see some of the projects that we have done so far!

Modeling the Future Challenge (MTFC)

MTFC is a competition for high school students, which challenges them to research and model a real world problem using actuarial science in order to define and mitigate risk. Learn more about MTFC here! Participation in this competition is a large part of our Math Modeling class and it allows us to work together in groups to create our own project and model risks associated with a topic that we find interesting. I am working with Andrew, Niranjan, Aansh, and Adam. Our team, The Guys, were in the semifinals with our project. We ended up changing our topic from the conflict in Gaza to Carbon emissions in the construction industry, so this proposal is not representitive of our final paper but is nonetheless an important piece of our experience in this competition.

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Epsilon School was our first modeling project of the year. We were tasked with helping the Epsilon School of Mathematics and Science hire a maximum of seven teachers to keep the class distributions fair as the number of students increased. We had to model the student to teacher ratios, the number of students per class, and the number of students per subject. After creating our model, we had to defend it by making a convincing argument that it is fair. We decided to hire two math teachers, one music teacher, one biology teacher, one english teacher, one chemistry teacher, and one physics teacher. Read our slideshow to find out why!