In Mass Academy's Math Modeling course, students learn a variety of mathematical topics from number theory to precalculus. The course focuses on modeling specifically, and students take part in many team modeling competitions throughout the year. We take part in competitions such as the Modeling the Future Challenge (MTFC), the High School Mathematical Modeling Competition (HiMCM), and NEML.
One of the competitions students in this course participate in is the Modeling the Future Challenge (MTFC). For MTFC, students choose a risky scenario they want to model. They build a model to assess the risks and provide recommendations to mitigate the risks. For this project, I am working in a team with Aansh Patel, Andrew Brown, Adam Yanco, and Mary O'Brien. In this competition, we are modeling the Carbon emissions due to the ongoing War in Gaza.
The reason we selected this problem is that we worry about the long-term effects of climate change of places around the world. Furthermore, we worry about instability in other parts of the world because it affects many people who are trying to continue their everyday lives, but cannot live normally due to conflict. Our intended approach involves finding a mix of data about war vehicle emissions (from tanks, aircrafts, etc.) and missile emissions. We aim to also account for emissions due to the manufacturing of these wartime resources, and we hope to model longer-term emissions from rebuilding efforts after the war is over.
In our math class, we are occasionally given problems to solve with a group over the course of a week. We are tasked with providing a write-up that documents our understanding of the problem, our problem-solving process, our solution, and problem extensions we may have developed. The problem shown here is about finding the day of the week for a given date.
On this project, I worked with classmates Andrew Brown, Jackson Whitley, and Lauren Kim. Our approach relied on using converting days of the week to numbers (mod 7), and making a lookup table for dates in each year and their corresponding days of the week. You can read more in the attached PDF file.