I did my project over the exponential growth of a neighborhood cat population. In it we started with one pair of mating cats giving birth to a litter of two kittens. Those two kittens in turn both gave birth to litters of two kittens, and so on. In our presentation we showed 5 generations of cats, which results in 31 cats after a period of 45 months (7 months sexually mature + 2 month gestation= how long it takes to produce a litter, so 9 months, and 9x5=45) This is exponential growth because the number of cats is increasing by a growing rate. This project definitely helped me understand exponential growth better and how to distinguish it from linear growth. The difference is that linear goes up by the same rate/number each time, but exponential goes up or down with a growing or decaying rate. Seeing how the math is used in a real life scenario makes me appreciate learning it more, because most of the time I'm like, "I'm never going to use this." but now I have something I can actually use to help me figure out real world problems or predict future situations.
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