This award is for an REU site for the next three summers to be held at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Fourteen undergraduates will spend eight weeks during the summer to work with several faculty members on their research projects and to participate in two seminars. The students will present their results in seminars attended by all the students and many faculty members. The students will be encouraged to publish their results if this seems appropriate. The students will be recruited from a wide area primarily in the south but not restricted to that area. The mathematical projects are in many parts of mathematics. Some examples are computational methods for phase change problems involving supercooling and dendritic growth, generalized semigroup rings, construction of 3-dimensional manifolds, Egyptian fractions, modeling the spatial nature of the spread of plant diseases, modeling the effects of a toxicant on a population, systems of ordinary equations in simple control theory and ecology growth, matrix involutions, random processes, and circle packings in the plane.
