Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU)

Summer 2013 dates:  June 3--August 2, SUBJECT TO PENDING NSF FUNDING. 

Combinatorics and Probability 2013

Application Deadline: 11:59:59 pm on Monday March 4 

This is a two-month (=nine-week) summer Research Experience for Undergraduates funded by the National Science Foundation. Summer 2013 will be its 21st year of operation under probabilist/discrete mathematician Anant Godbole. Previous incarnations of the program, offered at Michigan Tech and ETSU, have been named Discrete Random Structures, Discrete Probability and Associated Limit Theorems, etc.

ETSU is located at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains in scenic Johnson City, East Tennessee, 100 miles from Knoxville, 200 miles from Charlotte (A US Airways hub with connections to Johnson City) and 250 miles from Atlanta (A Delta hub with connecting flights to Johnson City). 


Team members work singly (seldom) or in small groups (often) on problems widely varying in kind and approachability. I suggest a number of problems at the beginning of the session, and generally most projects grow out of these. Each student typically works on two problems of her/his choice.  There's plenty of room for innovation, though.  Generally problems are in (i) Discrete Math; or (ii) Probabilistic Methods applied to Discrete Math

The problems for 2013 will be shared with students as soon as I make them offers, but I expect a strong focus on Universal Cycles and Permutation Patterns in 2013. 

Most often, publishable papers grow out of projects at the ETSU REU. Past participants have published in The Journal of Combinatorial Theory; Statistics and Probability Letters; Combinatorics, Probability and Computing; Advances in Applied Probability; Journal of Number Theory; Electronic Journal of Combinatorics; Discrete Mathematics; SIAM Journal on Discrete Math; INTEGERS; Graphs and Combinatorics; Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability and several others. Participants also quite often attend professional conferences where they present their work: For example, the 2012 group went to the Annual Joint Math Meetings in San Diego in January 2013, and some will go to the International Permutation Patterns Conference in Paris, July 2013.

Application materials

Other ETSU-REU site information