How to form a perfect math EE research question and topic?

[qwert123]

Hi Everyone!

I have started thinking and researching about the EE and i have come across various different topics and and research questions but none of them explains what things i should particularly explore or write about. Cryptography has always been one of my favorite topics and i probably want to do an essay relating to it. But the thing is i have read many forums and threads here in IB survival and many people say not to write an EE on a very broad and open ended topic, so simply taking "Cryptography" as a topic is not an option. So i thought of exploring something in the Enigma code or RSA cryptography, but i am having lots of problem forming a good and focused topic and research question. Should i be more focused on a topic like specifically explore something inside the Enigma code, or focus a research question on some comparison, or try to solve a problem with a solution?

Also, can someone please help me on how to approach the research question in the following essay?

I just want to clarify that i am not particularly asking someone to just give me a research question or a topic in cryptography, but someone who can help me understand the concept behind the research question.

Thanks

[kw0573]

I have never heard of the RSA cryptoggraphy but upon a quick search I see that it is based on prime numbers so that's some very discrete math going on there, which we don't really cover in the IB except for in one of the options. I am not able to recover what Enigma code has to do with math in my 10-sec lazy google search, but I'm guessing to do with binary numbers, again quite discrete.

Sounds like you need to do quite a bit of understanding the math before tackling the topics themselves. I had to learn matrices for by EE but it was in the syllabus just two years ago so I was able to get a great extent of help from my superviser and the resources available at school. But the study of prime numbers and binary numbers are much more broad and extensive than high school / first year uni matrices.

For this reason you should narrow your topic as much as possible (to maybe even just a single aspect of one of the cryptography topics). For my EE I studied nomograms (http://www.projectrho.com/nomogram/intro.html) and I focused on construction, AND accessibility. I think that was going bit of an over-kill as it ended up 20 pages but was not able to get to either aspect comprehensively (though there was little regurgitating of facts it was mostly personal derivation or experimentation)