This grant will establish at Mount Holyoke College, an Research Experiences for Undergraduates research site. Each summer for the next three years, twelve students will be engaged, in mathematical research. They will be drawn primarily from nearby colleges and universities and possibly from some schools further away. The students will work in groups of four, each group carrying out a different project under the supervision of a faculty member. The three research areas will be in algebraic geometry, partial differential equations, and statistics. They will involve extensive computer experimentation and will be directed at mainstream areas of mathematical research in which experimental evidence promises to illuminate, and possibly even overcome, current impasses in purely theoretical attacks. The groups will meet separately several times a day, but ample opportunity will be provided for students in different groups to exchange ideas. More specifically Dr. O'Shea will lead a project on limits of tangent spaces, Dr. Peterson will lead a project on evolution of planar domains and Dr. Gifford will lead a project on the use of bootstrapping in principal components analysis.
