The goal of the final project is for each student to have the time and space to investigate a topic of interest to them, and to apply mathematical thinking and tools germane to the course to that topic.

You may work in a group or share a project topic with another course.  This will allow your investigation to be more thorough.   You must use the tools of the course to address the topic at hand.  This may be through a novel idea or data set that you would like to model or you may take an established and published project and reproduce a portion of the results.

1. Please communicate with me regularly about your project idea.  

2. Once you have informal approval, then begin searching for literature that will serve to provide context for both the research question and the mathematical tools.

3. Form a research question and write a proposal.  

• This proposal will be due Wednesday, April 16th along with a short presentation to the class..  

• Provide a working title, abstract, and the names of any partners or any other class with which you are doing the research.  

• Cite at least 5 peer-reviewed resources (books and journal articles) both in a references section as well as incorporated into an introduction.  It may help you to organize your thoughts to add a summary of some important quotes from each article after each reference in the literature cited section.  The introduction must provide context and motivation for your research question.  

• The research question must be very clear, with one or two sentences of how you intend to address it.  The scope of your project should reflect whether you are investigating individually or with others, whether you are using as a joint projected with other courses, etc. and will be scaled in expectations accordingly.  

• Declare by what method you will formally present your results (poster or oral/ppt).

• NOTE: If you are either a math minor or an honors student, I expect that you will use Matlab as a tool investigating your research question.

4. Once the proposal is approved, work on the final project.  You are expected to have both formal oral and written presentation of results.  We will reserve class time for practicing the oral presentation, but you should submit your abstract as soon as it is approved to student conference (write it at the level of Calc I students).  The formal research paper will be in lab report style like the other reports in class.  This is an opportunity to present (to me) in-depth evidence of your work, your methods, and the context in which it is interpreted.

5. The exposition of the work must encompass:

• title (a rephrasing of the research question)

• introduction (contextual motivation for the research question)

• methods (a description about the mathematical tools used)

• results (the results derived from the use of the mathematical tools)

• discussion (an interpretation of the results and their significance)

• literature cited

6. All components of the final project will be due by the final exam period.