Math SL IA

[Guest Marioti]

Hey guys,

So I have to do my Math IA for SL this year and I don't know whether this is good or not

First I was just going to do one on olympic sports and breaking records but my teacher said it wasn't that great since so many people do it

So I wanted to do something totally different and what came to mind was the dragon curve

If you don't know what it is it's this pretty thing

But i dont know what to do

Can my Ia just be like exploring the mathematical properties of the dragon curve? Or does it have to be some sort of question ?

:/

thanks a bunch

[ctrls]

Sounds like an interesting topic, though I'm not too sure if you can write much about it. It's a fairly complex fractal by the sounds of things so it may be difficult to explore a lot of properties. In particular, most of it isn't on the syllabus at all, which makes it hard to investigate.

One thing that may work however, is a simple fractal such as the Koch snowflake. It's similar to the dragon curve that it's a "self-similar" fractal, but a lot properties can be worked out using knowledge from sequences and series. There's also a number of variants of the fractal such as the quadratic flake, which you may be able to link to and such. Alternately. you could focus on how fractals can be applied to various things, since there are a lot of uses in various fields.

[maroctam]

Honestly I wouldn't advise fractals at all, they're really abstract and there really isn't much to say about them except the fact that they're self-similar and look nice (at least it seems that way to me). To find their mathematical properties and writing a minimum of 6 pages on them would be ridiculously complicated.

I mean for the Dragon curve there are a couple of things that are somewhat obvious: each "part" is similar; only difference is the size and rotation, dragon curves can fit together in a tesselation, and they look cool. (that's all i can remember off the top of my head, i will edit if i find other stuff to add here)

The Koch Snowflake is more interesting since like ctrls said it is fairly simple and you can investigate it's infinite perimeter but finite area (you can do this with the dragon curve too), but still i don't think it's enough content for a math IA.

Since one of the criterions is "personal engagement" i highly suggest that you do your math IA on a hobby that interests you and something a lot more practical and maybe a topic that you could explore with some experimentation - though that isn't necessary: it's just easier to show your engagement if you do!

[Guest Marioti]

Sounds like an interesting topic, though I'm not too sure if you can write much about it. It's a fairly complex fractal by the sounds of things so it may be difficult to explore a lot of properties. In particular, most of it isn't on the syllabus at all, which makes it hard to investigate.

One thing that may work however, is a simple fractal such as the Koch snowflake. It's similar to the dragon curve that it's a "self-similar" fractal, but a lot properties can be worked out using knowledge from sequences and series. There's also a number of variants of the fractal such as the quadratic flake, which you may be able to link to and such. Alternately. you could focus on how fractals can be applied to various things, since there are a lot of uses in various fields.

Thanks for the suggestion I'll look into Koch snowflake a bit!!

Honestly I wouldn't advise fractals at all, they're really abstract and there really isn't much to say about them except the fact that they're self-similar and look nice (at least it seems that way to me). To find their mathematical properties and writing a minimum of 6 pages on them would be ridiculously complicated.

I mean for the Dragon curve there are a couple of things that are somewhat obvious: each "part" is similar; only difference is the size and rotation, dragon curves can fit together in a tesselation, and they look cool. (that's all i can remember off the top of my head, i will edit if i find other stuff to add here)

The Koch Snowflake is more interesting since like ctrls said it is fairly simple and you can investigate it's infinite perimeter but finite area (you can do this with the dragon curve too), but still i don't think it's enough content for a math IA.

Since one of the criterions is "personal engagement" i highly suggest that you do your math IA on a hobby that interests you and something a lot more practical and maybe a topic that you could explore with some experimentation - though that isn't necessary: it's just easier to show your engagement if you do!

The problem is that I really can't find anything good to do :/

I was just going to do olympics and records but I don't know if it's interesting enough.

I wanted to do something on dieting also but I don't know how to narrow down a topic :/ ( a good topic that is )