Need help with a project.

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I apparently need to do a presentation on "Math in everyday life" but I honestly can't think of something worth talking about. Does anyone have any suggestions?

This is for a college 1010 class.

Thanks!

Maybe a segment on the lottery? That topic can sometimes be interesting for people. Some people quip that the lottery is for the "mathematically challenged" because of the terrible odds of winning, others call it a "tax on the poor." Well I for one am not mathematically challenged, yet still play the lottery! When I purchase a powerball ticket before the drawing every Wednesday and Saturday night, I know full well that my odds of hitting all 6 numbers and hence the jackpot is approximately 1 in 195 million (slightly better when I am visiting a mega millions state, the odds of hitting the mega millions jackpot are approximately 1 in 175 million). And yes I am in poor, but I am in the camp of people who point out that despite the awful odds of winning, they are at least better than if you hadn't purchased a ticket at all! (rather than the camp of people who don't play and say that they won by not wasting a dollar on the ticket).

BUT there's good news! Some may call it OCD, I call it being an avid and dedicated change hunter, but most of my lottery-playing funds come from spare change I find off the ground and floor. Fast food drive thrus are an excellent location for finding change.

I like the lottery idea.

You could also go with the basics. Choosing a place to live based on the following:

1. Rent
2. Distance to work (for gas, wear and tear on vehicle, tolls)
3. Time it takes to get to work and other activities (church, library, clubs one belongs to);
4. Utilities (smaller space takes up less heat, a unit in with other units above/below/beside retains heat better)
5. Cost of laundry in laundry room


Okay, its not an everyday thing - but choosing a place to live takes some math figuring. Same as shopping for food and other necessities. Do you buy the pasta out of the bulk bins or buy the big box of pasta and store some. Is the cost of going to a big box warehouse for an advertised item actually cheaper once gas and time is accounted. Does one offer a babysitter payment $10 per hour in cash(no receipts) or pay by cheque at $13.00 per hour and get a tax refund (I'm not sure about the states, but in Canada, an adult babysitter's fees can be claimed on ones taxes, if this is done, the babysitter has to claim the fee as income). Is it cheaper to take the bus/train somewhere or to pay gas and parking? If you are going to paint your living room - how much paint do you need to buy (without overspending)? At the end of a busy day, I sometimes get a headache. I need to be able to make sure that I don't take more than 4000 mg of Acetaminophen from all sources per 24 hour period (more would cause liver damage).

On weekends, if I have a couple of drinks - I need to be aware of how many ounces of beer/wine/spirits I am drinking so that I don't make a fool out of myself or cause health problems. Just so you know - one drink is considered 12 ounces of beer at 5%, 4-6 ounces of wine and 1 ounce of spirits). So at the keg party when someone thinks that they only had two drinks, if the drink was a 36 ounce glass of beer - they would have actually had 6 drinks.

All of this is everyday stuff - it is not calculus or anything - but it is basic math that we could use everyday.

Good luck with your project.

I like the lottery idea, too, since it is a great place to start with a fun side of math:Probability and statistics. Everything from gambling, including poker and other Vegas games, is in there.

But if P&S aren't appropriate, how about topics on series and sequences, such at the Fibbonacci numbers or the Lucas number, and how some series converge (thus solving Zeno's paradox) and others diverge. Or infinity, transcendental numbers like pi and e (and the interesting places they show up in everyday life, from compound interest to the length of a meandering river).

Other topics I like involve areas in applied maths such as graph theory, and network theory, or social network theory (see the recent paper on using social network theory on Facebook to figure out who is gay), as well as game theory.

And then there's always the fun of number theory, the Queen of Math!

If you think you're up to it, you could try writing about fractals or the golden rectangle.

Or, maybe try something like taking the numbers from the clock when you wake up in the morning and carrying them forward into the day while manipulating them to compute or analyze things like ounces of food for breakfast and allowing travel time to get to the bus stop while figuring ratios along the way. Make it into an OCD thing with a syndrome twist!

The lottery idea does have some interesting and entertaining possibilities relating to statistics and probability.

You could compare different statistics about people winning the lottery to people gaining money success through business ventures and investments. Something like 9 out of 10 businesses fail in the first few years, but if you start 10 companies one is bound to make you a millionaire. So you could compare the econometrics of the lottery to other methods of taxation and so on.

There's all kinds of statistics and probabilities that you can make more entertaining than boring. Just pick something your passionate about and it will be easy.