Senior Project Proposal

I honestly have no idea what I want to do for senior project. I've been thinking and thinking and thinking and not a lot has come to mind. I came up with a lot of little ideas like using the images formulas and derivatives make and create an image. For example, learn about the rate the ripple of a dropplet expands and using that as the ripple of a drawing of a pond or something. Of course, the picture being all mathematically planned. I think that would be cool. I really don't know what I want to do, but I know I want it to have something to do with art or being able to draw. Maybe animation, I like that too. I would like to learn about the real world uses when learning about rates. Not so much in the stock market, but more like the natural beauties of the world. Perhaps the melting of ice burgs in the north pole? Something that has something to do with me. Something like how we applied fractals to how the world flourishes, I thought that was cool.

Quote: "By defining all the truths he could think of, he was able to build many proofs about numbers and shapes that we have used ever since. Once of his most wide-reaching proofs was about prime numbers. "
Questions: Could we use this method to accomplish other things? Does topics in other subject also associate themselves with this?
Comments: Okay, I'll admit, I didn't read a lot of it. It was a little lethargic sounding, but I did find a quote I thought could sort of compare to my life now. When he talked about defining all the truths, it reminded me of how I do math. It's like.. the first truth is that you sold the problem. You have defined that work. The second truth is checking your work. By checking your work, you are defining another truth. After defining all those truths, you basically have a completed building block of math. I thought that was just interesting to compare something like that to a small scale use of arithmetic.

Quote: "The speed at which a trained abacus user can calculate sums is remarkable, and proficient users are even able to visualize the movement of the beads in their heads in order to achieve astonishing feats of mental arithmetic."

Questions: Do people now day have this skill? Is mathematics a skill you can practice even when you're bad at it? What is the extent of mental math you can accomplish?

Comments: I thought the invention of this tool was interesting in general, this quote for the description was what I saw in particular. In some ways, I would like to learn to do mental math like this. I'm a very visual person, which is why I always have to draw pictures and multiply out numbers for myself. My mental math works to a good degree, but is it possible that I can improve it using this abacus tool enough? I think it's interesting that you can just visualize these numbers. Personally, I think I would confuse myself too much. Either way, it brings to light a new way of thinking, a new way of doing mathematics. How we're learning mathematics stems from that, but for kids now a day, calculators are the best thing ever. I feel like we are slipping on our mental math. It makes me wonder, if we incorporated this tool in our learning, would we subliminally learn mental math too?

Quote: "Numbers are words (and symbols) that we use to describe patterns."
Questions: Are there different contexts of numbers?
Comments: I thought this was a fun quote overall. People scour the globe looking for new ways of communication. As humans, we've created tons of new types of communications. Now we are looking to animals and learning their type of communication. I related the quote to this because I know scientists are actually using numbers (Statistics, data, readings) to decipher the communication of other living things. In a way, math communicates other communication. Weird huh?

Quote: "Because zero is a relatively new invention for humans, we normally use zero purely as a cardinal number, so we define quantities with it but don't count with it."
Questions: Why zero specifically? How did people not know when they didn't have anything?
Comments: Zero sounds like one of those things that people overlook because it's just.. there. I personally find it a little befuddling that zero was such a difficult number to work with. I mean, I understand it a little better now that we are studying calculus, but I find it funny how all the simple things are usually the hardest to understand, if that makes any sense.