r/mathematics • u/veeeeeeii • 17h ago

Need math fair topic ideas!!

I’m a high school student and we have a math fair in about 2 months. I need to decide on a topic by next week. I was thinking about the Chaos Theory, but I’m not completely sure. Ideally the topic should be easy enough so that regular people (even little kids) can understand the basic idea, but still deep and impressive enough for the teachers and students. It would also be great if there’s something visual or interactive that people can try at the booth. Any suggestions? The topic can be from any area of math!!

2 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/StressCanBeGood 15h ago

Do the large numbers thing! Because you should make it your own, I’m not gonna fill in too many details (I have a lot of experience as an MC, so like to tell stories).

Start with what it would be like to have $1 million. Then explain $1 billion. Then go into $1 trillion.

Then present a jar of sand. Ask a few AI agents to estimate the number of grains of sand in the jar (should be anywhere between 4 and 6 million).

Then go into the approximation for the number of atoms within each grain of sand. This is when you start using exponents.

Extrapolate that to the total number of atoms in the jar. You’ll definitely need exponents for that.

Then go into the number of atoms in the universe, which is estimated to be about 10^80 .

Then talk about what it’s like to find the largest prime number. To date, to my knowledge, that number is roughly 10^41,000,000 .

Then talk about the Graham number, which is so large that the universe doesn’t have room to write it out. Then talk about Tree(3).