Modeling Reality: A Survey of Applied Mathematics
S07
Adam Boucher
Applied Mathematics is concerned with how one connects mathematical models to the real world. In this course, we will develop techniques that allow us to take complex real-world problems and reduce them to forms that are amenable to mathematical analysis. We will investigate many different examples including but not limited to: a study of voting and fairness in democratic systems, economic and stock models, the population dynamics of competing species, the spread of pollution in lakes, and simple models of flight. There are no formal prerequisites, but students should be prepared to learn a great deal of mathematics.