REU Site: Algebra, Combinatorics, and Statistics

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The Department of Mathematics at Texas State University will host an 8 week summer REU in the summers of 2019, 2020 and 2021, involving nine students per year working in teams of three under the supervision of a faculty mentor. The program will provide lodging, meals, transportation, as well as a stipend for all students. The chosen participants will come from a selective pool of applicants, and the program will directly involve them in research projects guided by faculty mentors. Beyond successful research outcomes the objectives of the program are to introduce students to aspects of mathematical research and the broader mathematical community. At the same time the students will develop mentoring relationships with faculty as they consider pursuing graduate degrees and a career in mathematics. Students will be part of an active community at Texas State; in addition to the REU there are a number of summer programs and world-renowned mathematicians who visit campus, and participants will be involved in various activities that bring students and faculty together. A diverse body of participants is strongly desired and priority will be given to applicants from groups that are underrepresented in the mathematical community. This includes minority students, women, as well as those students coming from institutions with limited resources to support independent research projects for their undergraduates.The research projects include a diverse collection of topics based on the research interests of the faculty mentors. Specific projects include commutative algebra arising from graphs and matroids, algebraic and combinatorial aspects of higher dimensional tilings, combinatorial problems arising from group theory, arithmetic properties of group invariants, linear and permutational representations of groups, statistical analysis on biological data, and survival analysis. Participants will spend some of the time learning the necessary background while pursuing original research. Students will be asked to present their findings in oral presentations, and will be guided in summarizing their work in a mathematical research paper. In the course of the program students will be trained in various skills including literature review, using software such as GAP, Macaulay2, and R to make and check examples, oral presentation skills, as well as written mathematical communication using Latex. Communication with the participants will continue after the program ends, and for instance students will be encouraged to present their work at local, regional, and national conferences in the subsequent academic year.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.