Mathematical Sciences: 1992-1994 Summer Mathematics Institutes for Minority Undergraduates

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The Summer Mathematics Institute for Minority Students is a six-week residential summer institute which each year will accommodate approximately 30-36 minority undergraduates from the United States and Puerto Rico. Each student participant will have completed two or more years of collegiate mathematics with distinction. The students will participate in two intensive seminars, chosen from at least four offered, which have been designed to enable them to explore a mathematical topic in depth and to experience the excitement of creating mathematics. A principal emphasis common to all seminars is helping students to develop increased fluency with mathematical language, both written and oral. The overall goal is to help the students make important transitions: from learning algorithms to creating algorithms, from learning definitions to recognizing the salient features of a mathematical landscape and creating definitions, from learning particular theorems and topics to exploiting the power of mathematical interconnectivity--that is, from learning mathematics to doing mathematics. The Institutes will be operated as a four-way joint project of the Departments of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Texas at Austin, the Professional Development Program at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Dana Center for Mathematics and Science Education at the University of Texas at Austin. The Institutes will be held in alternate years at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Texas at Austin and will build on successful institutes held in 1989, 1990, and 1991. The Summer Institutes are conceived as part of a national strategy aimed at increasing the participation of historically under-represented minorities in mathematics and mathematics-dependent professions. The primary goal is to increase substantially the number of minority undergraduates pursuing careers in mathematics.