East Tennessee State University REU

Probability and Discrete Mathematics

Anant Godbole, Director.


This is a two-month (=nine-week) summer Research Experience for Undergraduates funded by the National Science Foundation. Summer 2008 is its 17th (and most likely last) year of operation under probabilist 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 East Tennessee, 100 miles from Knoxville and 250 miles from Atlanta.


Team members work singly (seldom) or in small groups (often) on problems widely varying in kind and approachability. Anant suggests a number of problems at the beginning of the session, and generally most projects grow out of these. There's plenty of room for innovation, though.

At ETSU, we have a main office with desks and a lecture room for our frequent group chats. As far as computing, e-mail etc., we have access to Dell Workstations in the math technology classroom.

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, and several others. Participants also quite often attend professional conferences where they present their work: For example, the 2007 group went to the Annual Joint Math Meetings in San Diego in January 2008, and this group will go to the same meeting in Washington, DC, January 2009.

Application materials


Other ETSU-REU site information