Math Studies IA Topics??

[ElPerdedor]

I am tasked with writing a math IA for Math Studies, but I have no idea what to write on. Our teacher is heavily leaning on the class to either write about a topic that uses Chi Squared testing or Linear Regression as our higher math process, but I don't know what to choose. I've always been bad with coming up with writing topics, but this one has me totally lost. What are some good topics to write on?

[aTeddy]

In general, a statistical approach is easiest and recommended, because there is sufficient complexity there for you to write a good piece of work. If you were leaning this way, you would most likely pick three variables of some entity (I picked latitude of a nation, social progress index of a nation and Gini Index of a nation) and statistically analyse their relationship. As a limit to Maths Studies, you'd probably have to compare variable A to variable B individually and then variable A to variable C individually. The processes you'd use would be: scatter plot, pearson's product-moment correlation coefficient (using a GDC), x^2 test, mean, chi-squared (by hand) and possibly linear regression. You'd satisfy the requirement for both the simple and further process and they are pretty hard to get wrong. 

Unfortunately, the Maths Studies IA is a really generic piece of work and in general, the fairly elementary level understanding of more complex mathematical techniques that you develop really stifles your choice of topic. I would say that almost 100% of my cohort did a statistics IA and compared fairly common variables like age, gender and HDI or variations on that theme. The good news is that its fairly hard to go wrong if you are willing to put the hours in and learn/apply the relevant structuring.

Good luck!