Math 3MB3 Final Project - Suggested Topics
NOTE: These are preliminary descriptions only. More details of each project
will be given after groups have decided on their topics.
Project 1: Arms Race
Imagine two economically competing countries: Purple and Green. Both countries desire
peace and hope to avoid war. While neither country will go out of its way to launch an
aggression, it also wouldn’t sit idly by if their country was attacked. Each country believes
in self-defense and will fight to protect itself. Both nations feel that the maintenance of a
large army and the stockpiling of weapons is “defensive” when they do it but “offensive”
when the other nation does it.
In this project, you will investigate how arms spending varies over time in each nation,
based on various assumptions about how each country’s arms buying behaviour influences
the other.
Project 2: Carbon Cycle
Carbon is a key element in terrestrial ecosystems. It enters the soil when plants die, or
shed leaves and branches (called “litterfall”); it leaves the system by being turned into
carbon dioxide by bacterial metabolism or other chemical processes. In recent history, human
industrial activity has begun to interfere substantially with the biological carbon cycle in
various ways, leading to climate change.
In this project, you will model carbon cycling from the atmosphere and back through various
components of an ecosystem (e.g., plants, litterfall, humus) and examine the effects of human
activity on this cycle.
Project 3: Drugs in the Body
The way in which drugs are administered to individuals and then metabolized by the body
is of great concern in pharmacology and medicine: drug dosage over time must be high
enough for some period to have a medicinal effect on the patient, but not so high that they
may overdose. There are various drug delivery methods available to those designing patient
therapies. Metabolic pathways also vary depending on drug administration and type.
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In this project, you will compare the effects of various drug delivery methods and metabolic
pathways on a patient’s dosage over time.
Project 4: Ontario’s Population
In order to plan for the future, governments often use projections of population size to
project demands on social services. Various factors affect population size: births, deaths,
immigration, and emigration.
In this project, you will build a demographic model to project Ontario’s population growth
or decay in the future.
Project 5: Conservation and Wildlife Management
It is important for ecosystems that the organisms within it remain in balance. If there are
too few members of species X, it could go extinct, which may cause problems for other
species that rely on X as a food source. In this case, humans may undertake conservation
efforts to save species X. On the other hand, if species X is too abundant, it may deplete its
main food source, which could pose a risk to other species that feed on the same organism.
Here, humans may consider wildlife management strategies, like hunting, to keep species X
from growing too abundant.
In this project, you will model an organism’s population and the effects of various conserva-
tion and wildlife management strategies on the that population.
Project 6: Ebola
The way in which an infectious disease spreads in a human population depends on many
factors, some of which are specific to the disease and population being studied. For instance,
in the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic, some disease transmission occurred at funerals,
as a result of contact between susceptible individuals and individuals who had recently died
of Ebola.
In this project, you will extend a simple disease model to account for transmission at funerals.
You may also consider other extensions appropriate for modelling the 2014 West African
Ebola epidemic.
Suggest Your Own Topic
If your group has an idea for a different project, you can suggest your own topic. This will
need to be discussed with the instructor.
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