The project director will lead eight undergraduates each year in a series of open ended research projects that will lead to a research publication in at least half the cases. REU students will form a cohort that will work on related but distinct problems in Combinatorics, Probability, and Probabilistic Combinatorics. A special focus will be on problems in Universal Cycles and Permutation Patterns. The problems selected for the students will be contemporary; difficult but tractable; of interest to the wider mathematical community; and lead to more questions with every new result. Students will present their research at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (or another specially targeted meeting). Every effort will be made to publish the students' work in refereed journals.
The goal of the project is to use low-threshold high-ceiling research projects in discrete mathematics to engage talented undergraduates in research that they can be proud of later in their careers. Participants will be able to make a more informed choice about graduate school and the profession as a result of participation. The organizers will actively involve the students with other NSF initiatives on campus, both funded and as-yet-unfunded. Specifically, (i) As in the past, REU students will serve as role models to undergraduates in ETSU's proposed NSF-STEP project. (ii) REU students will inspire, and receive computational assistance from, students in ETSU's Noyce Program. (iii) The organizers will recruit a cadre of REU students from a diverse set of schools, and facilitate research partnerships across this spectrum. Students will be selected after a nationwide search, with at least half chosen from schools with limited research opportunities. The principal investigator will endeavor to further improve the project's record of recruitment of underrepresented groups.
This REU site is co-funded by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program.
