This program brings together talented mathematics students to engage in pure mathematics research. Students are recruited nationwide, with particular emphasis on colleges without research opportunities, and on students belonging to groups traditionally underrepresented in mathematics. Areas of inquiry are expected to include number theory, game theory, combinatorics, and algebra. The primary purpose is to develop and encourage outstanding mathematical talent in the workforce of the 21st century, with a secondary purpose of advancing the frontiers of science by publishing and otherwise disseminating novel mathematical ideas.
The purpose of this REU (research experiences for undergraduates) site, like all others, is to expose talented undergraduates to technical research, so that they can better make decisions about their careers, and hopefully pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. As a side benefit, we hope to encourage inclusive participation by all people, including those historically underrepresented in these subject areas. This site focuses on mathematics, specifically on pure mathematics, and its ideal participants are brilliant undergraduates that lack research opportunities at their home institutions, and would otherwise not engage in mathematics over the summer. Instead, they come to San Diego, where our program houses them, pays them, feeds them, and engages them in mathematical scholarship for eight weeks. At the conclusion of the program, participants typically have experienced the entire spectrum of mathematics research: they have read background papers, they have written software code to generate data, they have formulated conjectures about mathematical objects, they have tested and proved their conjectures, they have written their results in the standard mathematical typesetting language (called LaTeX), they have presented their results orally both to their peers and at a math conference, and they have published at least a technical report of their findings. Frequently, the work that is produced is of such high quality that, after some rewriting, a version of it is published in peer-reviewed internationally renowned mathematics research journals. In the six years of this site being funded, we have published seven such papers, with one more under review and four more in preparation. For more details about this program, please feel free to visit the program website, found here: www.sci.sdsu.edu/math-reu/index.html
