I am looking for an idea research question for a 5000 word essay in Multi Variable Calculus

Question

As part of one of my university courses, Multi-variable Calculus, I need to write a 5000 word essay on an a research question that is on the course. Before telling you what I have as an idea here are the key things that the essay should cover.

1. The topic must be specific, yet have enough to it to have a research question, not a technique, and be in the 5000 word limit
2. The topic of research must be connected to the Multi-Variable Calculus

Here are my thoughts so far:

1. Researching surface areas of a 3+ dimentional function while estimating the function with taylor series. The problem is that this doesn't really fit with the first bit where it says that it should be a question rather then a technique
2. Researching applications of multivariable calculus in differential geometry. For this bit I would need a topic in differential geometry but I have no idea which. (If someone has any knowledge of differential geometry please leave a suggestion)
3. Furtherone investigating vector fields but I really don't have an idea of what a research question on this topic would look like that will be specific but also lenghty.

PS: I forgot to say that I will be expected to go over deffinitions, derivations on more complex topics and explaining example graphs.

Also just note that I am not asking for someone to hand me an essay, I am just looking for ideas/suggestions for a possible Research question

Any help will be greatly appriciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

DeRham cohomology could be an interesting topic as it underlies the relationship between divergence, gradient and curl.

Answer 2

One of the most difficult parts of writing an undergraduate essay is the feeling that you're just copy-pasting whatever someone else derived. Here's a couple ideas to make it your own:

• Make a review of literature. Once you've gotten your topic, stick with it, and find the relevant literature for your topic. Don't just cite and forget about it, but make your citations relate with each other. Just like relationships between people, it's the interactions between the citations that matter the most, not the material in-and-of itself (otherwise, they could just read that paper!)

• If you're handy with computers, try applying algorithms and libraries to a multivariable calculus problem. Make it incremental, so that even if you don't complete your project you'll have something to show for it.

• Find problems in your textbook that are difficult and interesting. You can write your essay on that problem, and extensions or generalizations to that problem. What different variations can you give? Be careful to research these variations, because some of them could actually be open!

• How about a history essay? You can explain when math topics came about, why they were developed in such-and-such a way. This can also give you perspective on current popular topics in math.

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To answer your question, here's some ideas for a topic.

Physics is a great source of multivariable essays, but it helps to limit it to a small subfield.

You could write about Aerodynamics. This is especially cool if you like sports, because you could write about the way a ball curves and how it affects its path. Might be kind of difficult, but there's a lot of material for you to cite.

You could write about electricity and magnetism, or how am AM/FM radio works. Someone in the comments mentioned Maxwell's equations, and those might be interesting to explore.

Going more into the differential equations territory, you could write about ecology and the Lotka-Volterra or Birth-death processes.

On a more linear-algebra point of view, you could write about image processing. For example, edge detection is a differential process which depends on the change between neighboring pixels, i.e. the gradient in the color space.