Math 087 - Mathematical Modelling

Schedule & Format

• Professor: George McNinch <george.mcninch@tufts.edu>

• There is no required textbook for the course. I will post notes – usually in the form of jupyter notebooks on the course web site (you can find a link to the site on Canvas).

Course Grading & Expectations

You should keep up with the posted material throughout the course!!

Your grade in the course will be based on problem sets (homework), two quizzes, two midterm reports and a final report.

Here are details on these course components:

• weekly problem sets,

  Since the class meets on Mondays and Wednesdays, problem sets will be collected weekly on Fridays (some weeks, a midterm report – see below – will instead by collected on Friday). Here is the planned collection schedule.

  A total of 10 problem sets will be collected.

  The problems will be posted on the course website, and your solutions will be submitted to Gradescope – see these remarks concerning use of gradescope.

• 2 quizzes

  There will be two in-class quizzes which are intended to assess your comprehension of the material.

  These will take place on Wednesday Feb 26 & Wednesday April 2.

  I’ll provide details of what will be assessed.

• 2 midterm reports and 1 final report

  Note that you will submit a proposal for the final report prior to work. Moreover, there will be a video component to your final project. After the final projects are collected, you must watch (at least) two videos created by classmates and write a brief summary of them. These summaries will be due during the final exam period (on the schedule day of the final exam for the class).

  Here are the dates:

  • midterm report 1 –2025-02-14
  • midterm report 2 – 2025-03-14
  • final report proposal due – 2025-04-04
  • final report due – 2025-04-25
  • final report - peer comments – 2025-05-02

Please refer to the course website where you will find more detailed description of expectations concerning these course components.

Your score in the course will be determined from these grading components by the following (implicit) formula:

Your letter grade is then determined from this score using the scheme described at this link.

Student Resources

For a list of student resources, please see the syllabus section of the Canvas site for the course.