The department’s NSF Mathematics REU Summer Program in mathematical analysis has had a remarkable first year. This REU program provides an intensive eight-week research experience that prepares advanced undergraduates for the rigours of graduate level research in mathematics.
Eleven talented undergraduates selected from a pool of 105 applicants from top U.S. institutions came to UTC on June 10th to work under the mentorship of Andrew Ledoan, Jin Wang, and Roger Nichols on original research on the interface of analytic number theory and harmonic analysis, differential equations and mathematical modelling, including optimal control simulation, and functional analysis and operator theory.
The REU program’s Special Summer Mathematics Colloquium Series, augmented by fun group activities, such as a variation of the game Who Wants to be a Mathematician, presented unique opportunities for the REU students to interact with visiting mathematicians and scientists from Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, whose research advance the frontiers of mathematical analysis and its applications.
Dr. Joe Wilferth, Interim Dean of College of Arts and Sciences, attended a meeting of the colloquium series on August 1st, in which he delivered welcoming remarks and encouraged the REU students to pursue graduate study in STEM fields.
We are pleased to report that all eleven REU students will be pursuing the Ph.D. degree program in mathematics. Featured at this meeting were four 30-minute talks presented by the REU research groups, introducing new and important results on the lower bounds for the L1 norm of exponential sums, modelling cholera transmission with disease control, explicit Krein resolvent identities for singular Sturm–Liouville operators with applications to Bessel operators, and a multi-scale model for cholera dynamics. These results will be announced to the mathematical community through arXiv.org. Their manuscripts will be submitted for publication in peer reviewed journals.
We are very proud of our first class of REU students and their hard work and accomplishments. We are looking forward to an equally spectacular second year for the REU program. These are exciting times for the department.
Leave a Reply