Math Modeling!

In Math Modeling, we work on mastering skills through projects, challenges, and real-world applications. This includes discovering the math behind the faro shuffle, collecting our own data to accompany our statistics unit, completing and modeling weekly problems, competing in competitions like New England Mathematics League (NEML), and long-term contests such as The High School Mathematical Contest in Modeling (HiMCM) and Modeling the Future Challenge (MTFC).

One of the long-term competitions we take part in is MTFC. This contest allows students to choose a topic of interest or a problem that exists in the real world and use mathematical modeling skills to provide a solution after analyzing pre-existing data and assessing risks. My group, Adrika M., Aishani G., Jasmine P., Parnitha K., and I chose to look at addiction in patients after being prescribed opioids post-surgery. According to the National Institutes of Health, over 13,000 people die every year from addiction due to prescription opioids. We concluded that this issue would be problematic for patients, healthcare professionals, health insurance companies, the government, and other parties involved. Our proposed solution involves varying periods of rehabilitation, but also determining which types of surgery, demographics, genders, and ages are most associated with postoperative opioid abuse in order to assist us in creating better guidelines for prescribing opioids. This makes our model likely to be a stochastic, dynamic, statistical model. Have trouble viewing the file? Click Here.

Another activity we have done in this class is a modeling assignment where we had to distribute a set of 7 staff across a school that experienced an increase in student body. We were given data on the department splits as well as prior enrollment. The challenge was effectively incorporating the data without overfitting our model. Our final proposal was presented in these slides. Have trouble viewing the file? Click here.