Brainstorming and Barnstorming: An REU site at KSU

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``Brainstorming and barnstorming,'' is an NSF funded research experience for undergraduates site at Kansas State University that will run for three consecutive years starting in the Summer of 2005. Each year the program will accept 10 undergraduates and employ fourteen faculty for an eight-week program. The primary objectives of this REU will be: 1)recruit new talent into mathematics 2) help these students make the transition from problems that take minutes to solve to problems that take years to solve; 3) expose these students to a variety of mathematical ideas that they might not ordinarily encounter in their studies. The academic portion of the program will utilize three separate components to achieve these objectives. Each component is an adaptation of a program that has already been a success in the Kansas State University mathematics department. The first activity will be modeled on the KSU problem seminar and problem-solving group. In the problem seminar, faculty members show students problem-solving techniques. In the problem-solving group students collaborate on challanging problems that may require the new techniques. The second activity will introduce the participants to a problem from applied mathematics. Each year this problem will be a simplification of a problem coming from the aviation industry. The problem will be similar in scope to the problems in theMathematical Contest in Modeling. After an initial introduction to the applied problem, the students will be split into three groups and each group will be asked to develop a solution to the problem. After one week of progress, the groups will be brought back together and the various approaches will be compared and synthesized. The faculty will suggest improvements and the participants will agree on a plan of research for the remaining weeks. The third activity will be a notions and open research problems seminar in pure mathematics. There will be regular ``after math'' social activities. The highlight of these activities will be flight training for interested students.