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So I need to do two senior seminars next year, one for mathematics and one for statistics. But I have no idea what I want to do them on. I was wondering, since you're all smart people here, if anyone went through a math/stats track in college, and what topics particularly interested you?

Thanks,
The Roc

So I need to do two senior seminars next year, one for mathematics and one for statistics. But I have no idea what I want to do them on. I was wondering, since you're all smart people here, if anyone went through a math/stats track in college, and what topics particularly interested you?

Thanks,
The Roc

I double majored in Mathematics and Accounting in college.  My favorite class was hands down Number Theory.  Number Theory is basically the study of why numbers are so cool!  There was a LOT of modular arithmetic, a lot of proofs (such as proving that the product of the 3 sides of a right triangle will always be divisible by 60, or that there are an infinite number of primes), and it was a lot of fun!  The "pinnacle" of the class, in my opinion, was RSA encryption, where we learned how to send encrypted messages via really really large prime numbers (and how to unencrypt them!), and also learning about the mathematical journey to solving Fermat's Last Theorem.  If you don't know anything about FLT, I suggest you read up on it!

If real-life application is where your heart is, Probability and Statistics was definitely the most useful.  But Number Theory was my favorite in college.

I am currently in my second semester of partial differential equations. I like it because it's math that is closer to actually describing the physics of the real world, as opposed to the first few years of calculus, which aren't helpful for much other than idealized situations.

Other classes that I have really enjoyed:

-Complex Analysis
-Cryptology and Number Theory
-Fourier Analysis (though this is mostly used for PDEs anyway)

Probability and statistics was okay, but wasn't my favorite.