The UCDavis VIGRE project
Funded by the National Science Foundation.
Research Experiences for Undergraduates
Should you choose to participate in the REU Program, you would
join a faculty mentor in the pursuit of new knowledge and help to
answer unsolved problems. In the case of mathematics, you can work
on a research project in many different ways and on many different topics.
A typical day of the REU working time involves trying to solve a
problem (e.g how many different solutions are there to a certain
system of polynomial equations?) by quietly thinking with paper and
pencil, by writing computer programs to test a conjecture, by gathering
data, or by displaying a mathematical object in a computer screen. You
may often find yourself presenting a recent discovery on the chalkboard,
on a computer, or using an overhead projector, to a group of fellow REU
members. Like a real mathematician, you would typically perform not just
one of the above examples, but many of them.
You will have the opportunity to work closely with your mentor, who will
teach you about his/her own research and what it is like to conduct
original research. Some projects will be for a small group of students
(five to ten) working together under the supervision of professors
and graduate students. If you are working with a large group of
students, you will learn how to work with a team, to divide up duties
amongst yourselves, and to report your results back to the group.
While your mentor will guide your project and suggest what to read,
what computer "experiments" to conduct, what calculations to make,
s/he will not give formal classroom lectures or assignments. You
will practice looking for patterns in your data or computations
and making conjectures of what theorems hold or what direction to
move in next. You will be expected to present your work, and to write
it up in clean detail, in the process catching mistakes and reflecting
on the "big picture."
As in a course, you are expected to work hard and do your "homework,"
with the big difference that now you are working to create new knowledge!
This is obviously an added excitement to the job. Toward the end of the
project, you may spend a lot of time writing and correcting a paper
reporting the final results.
One thing is for sure: You will be expected to write a report or
paper on your work at the end of the quarter and to give a
presentation at our local undergraduate research conference.
Some of our hard-working students have even managed to publish
their results in international mathematics journals.
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