CUNY Combinatorics REU

The spots for the summer of 2018 have been filled. Information regarding the summer of 2019 program will appear in the fall. Summer of 2018 participants (in alphabetical order):

• Sara Fish (Caltech)
• Matthew Hase-Liu (Harvard)
• Robert Krueger (Miami University)
• Ruifan Yang (Boston College)

The CUNY Combinatorics REU is a summer program for undergraduates, focused on doing combinatorics research with the goal of producing a research paper. This will take place for 6-7 weeks during the summer of 2018 in New York City, where each student will be individually mentored by the organizers. We are based in the mathematics department of CUNY's Baruch College, located in the heart of Manhattan.

The program is organized by Adam Sheffer and Rados Radoicic. While this is the first year of this REU, Adam has been running similar projects in Caltech for the past few years. For some recent successful projects that were mentored by him, see here and here. We will take advantage of the REU's central location to invite mathematicians from nearby universities (and visitors) to give talks or just to meet and chat with the participants.

Topics. The research projects will be in Discrete Geometry, Additive Combinatorics, and related topics. No previous familiarity with these topics is required. If you would like to get a better idea of the type of problems we will work on:

• For a glance at Discrete Geometry, see Chapter 1 of this book (you might need to first go over the first paragraph of the Notation part of the introduction).


• For a glance at Additive Combinatorics, see this chapter.

For more details, see potential project 1 and potential project 2. These are just two examples, and additional projects would be suggested to the participants.

More details. We will only take 2-3 participants. Each participant is expected to be in NYC for 6-7 weeks during the summer. The default dates are June 4th to July 20th, although this is flexible. Each participant will be provided with a stipend of 6,000$ for accommodation, food, and other expenses. We can either provide you access to reasonably priced dorms, or you can decide to stay in a different place of your liking (in either case, this will be paid by part of the stipend).

Each participant will work on their own project with constant support from the mentors, although we are open to the idea of participants working together. Although the projects are separate, the participants will work in the same office, will attend events together, and are expected to discuss their projects with each other.

For question and additional details, please email math.reu@baruch.cuny.edu.

Applying to the REU. We are looking for undergraduates who are strongly motivated to produce a research paper, are hardworking, and can work independently between meetings with the mentors. Please apply only if you think that you will be able to get yourself to spend long periods of time working hard on mathematical research.

Since the stipends for the participants are funded by NSF, only US citizens or permanent residents can apply. If you are not a US permanent resident but may have an alternative source of funding (such as Caltech's SURF), you may contact us to discuss this.