Hometowns of students on the Mathematics course at UFSJ- MG: a study using Circular Statistics

A common feature in Brazilian universities is to welcome students not only from the city where the institution is located, but also from nearby cities. Some relocate to the city where the university is situated, while others commute daily to obtain their degrees. Many students in the Mathematics program at the Federal University of Sao Joao del-Rei (UFSJ) are not originally from Sao Joao, and this article is based on the geographic coordinates of their hometowns. Location is a crucial tool for analyzing the disposition of human activities in space, and in the unit circle, the coordinates will be treated as angles centered on the city of Sao Joao. Traditional statistics study data expressed on the real line, where 1 and 360 are values separated by hundreds of numbers. These characteristics do not capture the continuity of the circle, where 1 and 360 are neighboring angles. Thus, this study used circular data, calculating circular descriptive measures such as mean, variance, median, length of the resultant mean vector, and circular scatter plots. The objective of this study was to locate the region that, on average, has the most students in the Mathematics program at UFSJ. It can then be inferred that the influence zone of this UFSJ program is concentrated in the cities southeast of the host city, around 309o (circular mean).