In class we have been continuing on with our project and took our first quiz of the semester on number systems. We also had our second mentor meeting with Christos to talk with him and ask more questions about our field of study. During this meeting my group and I were able to talk with Christos about some of the things we were running into that we weren't familiar with while we were working on practice problems in our fields. I am studying statistics, so I was coming across lots of percentiles and how to calculate them properly. Christos was telling about ‘the locator’ (L=k/100 x n) which is used for finding the number that lays in that percentile slot you are calculating. We also went through a couple of practice problems together which was definitely very helpful for all of us. During this second mentor meeting I felt that our group as a whole was pretty quiet and weren't exactly sure what to specifically ask Christos, but once we got a couple of our questions out there, we were able to get some valuable information. For the next mentor meeting we have I think that my group should plan a bit better and discuss prior who is going to ask what and make sure everyone has a question beforehand so the conversation can flow a little better and we wont have too many silent moments.
We recently took a quiz on number systems that we have learning about so far this semester and I was actually very proud of myself for scoring a 16/16 on it! This quiz did require me to do my own research on some of the topics that we were not taught yet, but as Dylan explained, were included on the quiz to force us to do that research and try to figure it out the best we could. I tended to stay within Khan Academy for my research, I find it is the most helpful and includes videos of them explaining some of the problems. This quiz was a ‘take home quiz’ which allowed us about a week to look at it and use whatever source most valuable to us. I mostly worked on this on my own (with some assistance from khan academy and a calculator) and when I was finished I was very satisfied that I figured out the problems pretty much by myself. Continuing with our specific field of mathematics, I have been dealing with lots of practice problems that I had found online and in some college texts involving percentiles and IQR (quartiles). Most of the problems included data sets and questions like; calculate the IQR, calculate the k percentiles, find the outlier. These concepts were not too difficult so I was able to complete them fairly easily after doing a little research about some definitions here and there. This week we also discussed some ways to help us solve problems that we are unfamiliar with. You have to pick out the pieces of the problem that you do know, solve that and go from there. Rather than trying to dive into a completely new type of problem, it is a lot easier to unpack the information that you have done before.
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This week we were finally able to connect and meet with our mentor! Since I am studying statistics, my group met with Cristos, who studied and works with applied mathematics. He gave us not just information about statistics, but also advice on how to be a good mathematician and how we can be able to one day work in the field of mathematics if we so choose. One thing that struck me was when Cristos was telling us that as young mathematicians we need to focus on the basics and always practice and remember the fundamentals of math because it will help you greatly in the long run. In class we were faced with a college level text on complex numbers that we were suppose to unpack into ways that we could understand. After we completed this text we then went on to find a college level text about our specific field of study. I found that a good way to understand these texts is to circle every word/concept I did not understand and then go back and research each of those individually, and then rewrite that section in words that I understood more. Since these are college level texts and I am only a sophomore, obviously there are things that are still going to confuse me a bit. The next time around I want to search for texts that highlight these specific ideas that I previously didn't understand so I can then get a good overall understanding of the concepts. One thing I did learn about was things like complex and imaginary numbers, tangent, cosine, sine, argument and absolute value.
The past two weeks have been all about getting familiar with many math fields and subfields to help us with our project. We started off by playing the ‘wiki game’ where you start off with one mathematical subject and try to get to the next subject by pressing on the links within the articles you read. Each link you click on you have to write down that topic and your own definition and you repeat this process until you reached the other topic. Once everyone at the table was able to connect their topic we created a web map filled with different math terms and connected them to other table groups in the class. This taught me many new math terminology and also was a visual representation that so many things in math are related to one another. After looking at many fields of math I chose to dig deeper into the field of statistics. I found statistics interesting because it deals with so many things and staticians get to deal with data sets from various surveys/topics related to so many other fields as well. For the project I will either work by myself or with one other partner depending on which branch of statistics I will want to research further. Sometimes I like to work in a group/pair because it allows you to split up the workload and have two brains thinking and have someone to bounce your ideas off of. Also there are times where it is best to work on your own so that the final product can be exactly how you envisioned and you can do everything the way you want it to be.
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March 2018
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