Mount Holyoke Undergraduate Mathematics Summer Research Institute

Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley MA

Investigators

Abstract

The mathematics department at Mount Holyoke College will operate a mathematics summer research site for undergraduates each summer from 2004-2008. Participation in the REU program introduces students to what life is like at a mathematical research institution. We will select ten students drawn from a broad range of U.S. colleges and universities to engage in mathematical research. The students will work in groups of five or six, each group carrying out a different project under the supervision of a faculty member. The projects will be directed at mainstream areas of mathematical research and often involve extensive computer experimentation and computation. An important message of our program is the the power of examples to illuminate, and possibly overcome, current impasses in purely theoretical attacks. The groups will meet separately several times a day but ample opportunity will be provided for students in different groups to exchange ideas. Students plan, organize, and speak in their own seminar series, attend and speak in the program's weekly seminars, and attend and speak at local and national meetings. In this small group setting, students learn deep concepts in a very concrete way and this intense exposure helps them in graduate school in two ways. First, students are better prepared in their first years of graduate school simply because they have already mastered these concepts. Second, and more importantly, the REU experience teaches students how to take a new concept and flesh it out, using examples and questions until they gain the essential intuition for it. Finally, each student in our program writes up a preprint of his or her work and these preprints are available on our web site. Publications and honors theses often result from the summer's work.