REU Site: An Undergraduate Research Program in Combinatorics and Number Theory

University Of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth MN

Investigators

Abstract

The objective of the Duluth REU program is to provide a professional level research experience for nine of the nation's most talented undergraduate mathematics students, an experience that is not available at their home institutions nor at other REUs. The program provides a unique research community-of-peers setting that emphasizes developing the independence of each student. Rather than having students work in groups on problems with a faculty adviser who contributes substantially to the research effort, at Duluth the approach is to treat undergraduate students with extraordinarily high potential for doing significant research as though they are working on a PhD thesis problem where the adviser provides the problem and mentoring but avoids direct involvement in solving the problem. The program has a 38 year history of developing students into independent, high level research mathematicians and integrating them into the research community at an early stage of their careers. The program has produced over 200 papers published in well regarded professional research journals and 133 PhDs. The development of human resources is the explicit purpose of the Duluth REU program. The most significant contribution the Duluth program makes towards that purpose is the training of future generations of mathematicians who will foster undergraduate research when they become professionals. Participants in the program become part of a network of extraordinary alumni who are important members of the mathematics community. Among them are people who are tenured, or on tenure track, at Princeton (Fields medal winner and member of the National Academy of Sciences), MIT (3 total, one with an endowed chair and a member of AAAS), Stanford, Chicago, Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, UC San Diego and Northwestern. Ten are American Mathematical Society Fellows. Duluth REU alumni have substantially contributed to the national security and the economic competitiveness of the U.S. Many alumni have been employed at the Center for Communications (a subdivision of the Institute for Defense Analysis) at La Jolla and Princeton and two are at the National Security Agency. Program alumni have been employed at Google, Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, Facebook, Sun Microsystems, Dropbox, Ksplice, Quixey, Yelp, Khan Academy, and a variety of other software companies, and three have started their own companies.