Directed Reading Program

The Directed Reading Program (DRP) gives undergraduates the opportunity to:

• work one-on-one with a graduate mentor for the semester,
• learn an area of mathematics not covered in any course, and
• gain valuable presentation skills.

Requirements

The DRP pairs undergraduate students with graduate-student mentors for an independent reading course. Undergraduate participants are expected to:

• meet once per week with the graduate-student mentor,
• work independently for approximately three hours between meetings, and
• give a 10- to 15-minute talk on their project at the end of the semester.

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DRP Activities - Spring 2020

• Kick-off event (Jan. 21 at 5pm [mentors] and 5:30 [mentees] - Blocker 220)
• A presentation on "How (not) to give a talk" (Thursday, April 2 at 5pm - * online via Zoom *)
• Final presentations by undergraduate participants (April 20 and 23 and 27 at 5pm - * online via Zoom *)

The Spring 2020 participants and their topics:

• Soohee Bae (mentor: Mahmood Ettehad) - Data driven framework for dynamical system identification
• Dillon Berry (mentor: Joshua Goldstein) - The Foundations of Probability
• Alexander Crabtree (mentor: Erik Davis) - An Introduction to Simple Continued Fractions
• Riley Decker (mentor: Zheng Kuang) - Groups Isomorphic to a Proper Subgroup
• Thomas Dexter (mentor: Petr Naryshkin) - Isometries of the Hyperbolic Plane
• Alicia Duran (mentor: Kelly Maluccio) - TBA
• Thomas Flowers (mentor: Matthew Faust) - Quantum Graphs
• William Frendreiss (mentor: Agniva Dasgupta) - A new ordering of the rational numbers
• Jaqueline Gonzalez (mentor: Priyanga Ganesan) - One- and two-dimensional flows
• Daniel Kimble (mentor: John Weeks) - Quantum Error Correcting Codes
• Logan Perry (mentor: Amudhan Krishnaswamy-Usha) - Markov Chains and Their Applications
• Sofia Pineda (mentor: Mansi Bezbaruah) - Solvability and Algorithms
• Neel Reddy Pochareddy (mentor: Tushar Pandey) - Convex Optimization: From theory to the Endless Applications
• Fengqiao Wang (mentor: Haoshen Li) - Compute Geodesic Using Heat Method
• Jackson West (mentor: Changningphaabi Namoijam) - Basics of P-adic Analysis
• [Anonymous student] (mentor: Byeongsu Yu) - Random Walks and Catalan Numbers

To participate in Fall 2020, see below.

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How to participate (undergraduates) - Fall 2020

We encourage applications from any undergraduate who:

• will be a sophomore, junior, or senior during the semester of the program, and
• has completed a year-long calculus sequence, and
• is interested in learning interesting mathematics outside of the classroom.

To apply to participate in Fall 2020:

• complete the application for undergraduate students (Deadline: March 27, 2020), and
• register for Math 285 (Directed Studies), section 504, for 1 credit-hour.

Applicants will be notified by April 3, 2020.

How to participate (graduate students) - Fall 2020

To be announced (by email)!

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DRP Activities - Prior Semesters

• See here

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Organizers

The DRP is organized by Kari Eifler and Taylor Brysiewicz, with faculty mentor Anne Shiu.

Resources

Project ideas from other DRPs can be found at the websites of the DRP Network, the Maryland DRP, and the University of Texas DRP.

Acknowledgment

The DRP is supported by the National Science Foundation (CAREER grant DMS-1752672), a Montague-CTE (Center for Teaching Excellence) Scholar grant, and a DRP Network mini-grant supported by the National Science Foundation (grant IUSE-1740143).