Math Exploration Topic Brainstorm

[Roselian]

Hi everyone,

Sooo - I need to have a math IA topic within about the next week. I tried a little to find a topic during the summer, but honestly it didn't take much to make me give up. Math is really not my thing, I have to work really hard to understand what we're doing.

This was one of my ideas - but I need feedback. Is it at all suitable?

Gapminder.org is a statistics site that we use a lot in Geography, for example to see the relationship between a variable such as infant mortality, and the wealth/health of a nation, which we would then use to determine how 'developed' a country is. The main advantage of the site is that it shows you how trends change over time - you can scroll from about 1900 to the present day.

One interesting new concept that we learnt about in Geography was that the division of 'developed' vs. 'developing' is no longer accurate, and I found a related graph on Gapminder.

My idea was to download the data used for both variables on the graph, and recreate the graph, for three different points in time, and then calculate the relationship between the two variables for each point in time. Then I could test the strength of each relationship, and see whether it could be used to prove that two certain variables cannot be used to prove how 'developed' a nation is.

What do you think?

[Kammer]

I am not familiar with the maths you plan on doing, but remember that it needs to cover at least one topic from your course. I am doing geographic profiling of criminals. And so far it works fine for me.

As far as I can say, your topic is good and a unique idea. And you probably will cover statistics and probabilty from the course, just like me.

If your fine with the maths and find enough information i would just go ahead. But don´t underestimate the research part. I found some things on the internet for my topic and then started suddenly i noticed that i don´t have enough information and i had to download doctoral thesis and read through to get enough information to perform the maths.