This award establishes an Research Experiences For Undergraduates site for the next two summers at the University of Washington at Seattle for 8 students. The students will work on numerical solutions of inverse problems for partial differential equations. They will focus on certain specific problems, in particular on inverse problems arising from the conductivity equation. The inverse problem is to determine the conductivity throughout a body from measurements of potentials and currents on the boundary. There is no known good way to calculate the conductivity. We intend to explore the recent attempts by Wexler, Isaacson, Kim and others to compute the conductivity numerically. The program will run for eight weeks. For about two weeks there will be lectures by one or the other of the Principal Investigator's describing the problems and various possible numerical approaches. The students can then begin working on projects of their own, using the available computing facilities. The students will be encouraged to work in teams of two, three or more, possibly in collaboration with the faculty members. At the end the students will be expected to give a seminar talk on his/her progress.
