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Math In The World & Why It Matters

aashritcunchala

Businessman sitting on a chair and studying math formulas on blackboard

Hi everyone! My name is Aashrit Cunchala. I am a double major in applied mathematics and data science looking to also minor in computer science and applied statistics expected to graduate in the spring of 2025. I’m in the Frederick Honors College and am currently considering an honors thesis in applied mathematics, specifically mathematical modeling. Additionally, I am interested in linguistics and am fluent in Sanskrit! I’m currently working on learning French and would love to pick up new languages. I am excited about the opportunity that the CURF award presents for me to gain research experience in mathematical modeling. I believe that the experience of going through the research process and learning how to conduct independent research will be crucial to my academic endeavors and my career beyond. My goals for this specific project include publishing my research in a respected international journal so that it can be viewed and used by others. To that end, I will produce a manuscript that will outline my findings and my discoveries. I also want to partake in discussions with others and increase the visibility of my findings by attending conferences such as the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM). The CURF experience will allow me to learn more about how I can apply mathematics in the context of different fields and allow me to gain more knowledge on how I can use my mathematics background in research. After undergrad, I will be pursuing a PhD in applied mathematics. I currently plan on pursuing a PhD related to modeling and financial mathematics.and hope that the experience in mathematical modeling gained during this CURF experience will be beneficial in not only being accepted to grad school, but also in succeeding once I am in grad school.

My research project is under the mentorship of Dr. Sabrina Streipert in the department of mathematics. My project focuses on leader-follower models which provide a mathematical tool to study opinion dynamics. Existing leader-follower models consider one leader and n agents which means that there is largely one opinion that dominates the conversation. However, most real-life situations have multiple leaders. Our goal is to incorporate this assumption and consider models with several leaders with potentially competing interests. By studying these models we want to  understand how people behave in a scenario with multiple leaders and multiple agents. There are a variety of immediate applications that have real-world value. In economics, opinion dynamics can be used to model public perception on phenomena such as “the adoption of new products and services, the spread of new technologies, or the emergence of fads and fashions”. In the social sciences, “opinion dynamic models can be used to understand the role of specific social factors on the acceptance/rejection of news content” . There also exist opinion dynamic models that attempt to capture the financial market and even predict voter opinions. My goal is to formulate these multi-leader, multi-follower models and investigate them analytically and computationally. This will provide a building point from which we can apply the model to political and social data and investigate its real-world predictive ability.

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