REU Site: Willamette Mathematics Consortium Research Experiences for Undergraduates

Willamette University, Salem OR

Investigators

Abstract

The Willamette Mathematics Consortium REU is an intensive eight-week summer research program which immerses undergraduate students in a challenging, transformative, authentic research experience. Each summer, three research teams engage in three different but simultaneous research projects which share a common unifying theme. Each research team consists of three undergraduates and one faculty mentor. Research teams live and work in close proximity. This proximity, combined with several organized social outings, give participants ample opportunities to collaborate and establish new and lasting bonds within the greater research community. Program activities include the creation of new mathematics, career development workshops and training, and presentations at regional and national conferences. These activities are designed to increase participants' knowledge of mathematical content and process, strengthen their technical communication skills, and increase their awareness of and preparation for careers in mathematics and other STEM fields. Student applicants are recruited nationwide, with targeted recruitment of underrepresented groups and students from schools with limited research opportunities. Research each summer is organized around a broad mathematical field: ring and matrix theory in the first summer, statistics and random processes in the second, and graph theory and combinatorics in the third. Specific projects planned are algebraic voting theory, predicting decompositions for complete intersections, and unipancyclic matroids for the summer of 2015, mixing times of Markov chains, topological and statistical data analysis, and the modified Ehrenfest chain for the summer of 2016, and geometric intersection graphs, visualizing dessins d'enfants, and competitive graph coloring for the summer of 2017. These projects are chosen from the faculty mentors' ongoing research programs and expertise. Mentors have a proven track record of leading undergraduate research in these areas, having collectively guided 142 undergraduate students on research projects resulting in 73 external research presentations by undergraduate participants, 10 publications, and 13 papers in progress, all with student co-authors.