This grant funds the REU site at the University of Texas at Tyler. The 8-week program will take place in the summers of 2014, 2015, and 2016. Each summer, nine REU students will work in groups of three with one faculty mentor leading each group. The mentors will provide research questions in combinatorics on words, network reliability, and chemical graph theory. Each group will spend the first weeks of the program learning basic theory pertaining to their research area. They will generate examples and formulate conjectures. During the middle of the program students will seek proofs of their conjectures. REU students will write their results in a professional format and prepare a final talk and a poster suitable for presentation at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January.
The goal of the REU is to give students an introduction to mathematical research that will help prepare them for and encourage them to pursue PhDs in mathematics. The investigators believe that this program will have a greater effect by recruiting students from underrepresented groups; in particular, Hispanics, women, and first-generation college students. In addition to daily research, REU participants will attend talks by former research students who are currently enrolled in graduate school and by other local faculty. They will have the opportunity to ask questions about graduate school and academic careers. Students will keep a daily research journal, and they will learn mathematical typesetting. The REU projects have been carefully chosen to be accessible to undergraduates with basic training in proof writing, but with the potential to produce novel results. The results will be presented at national conferences. It is expected that some projects will result in publications in peer-reviewed journals.
