San Francisco State University-Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Collaboration for Education

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This project will establish a long-term collaboration between the Mathematics Department of San Francisco State University (SFSU), one of the country's largest centers of education for minority students, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), one of the world's leading mathematical research centers. Each semester this collaboration will revolve around an undergraduate topics course at SFSU based on one of the emphasis programs at MSRI that semester. The SFSU-MSRI collaboration will be taught by a faculty member in the SFSU Mathematics Department (a different person each semester). This person will participate in the MSRI program associated with the chosen topic during the semester and will act as a bridge between SFSU students and the research mathematicians at MSRI. The SFSU-MSRI collaboration course will feature monthly talks by leading mathematicians who are visiting MSRI to participate in its program. All lectures in the SFSU-MSRI collaboration course will be made available to the world through MSRI's streaming video technology. This technique, pioneered by MSRI for publishing mathematical lectures on the World Wide Web, uses one browser window to show the slides of the talk and another to show the speaker while the sound flows smoothly. Because research mathematicians rarely pitch work to undergraduates, as they will in the SFSU-MSRI collaboration course, the entire set of lectures will be made available on CD-ROM for dissemination to other universities. So that SFSU students and faculty can have the library resources needed to prepare for MSRI programs, mathematics books will be purchased for the SFSU library. Each semester, SFSU will emphasize the purchase of books for the library related to the topic of that semester's SFSU-MSRI collaboration course. This project also will support four SFSU graduate students each year. These students will participate in various activities at MSRI each semester. SFSU will become an Academic Sponsor of MSRI. Membership benefits include sending two graduate students, expenses paid, to the MSRI Summer Program, inviting speakers from MSRI with expenses partially paid, receiving the preprint series, and financial support for conferences.