Conference: An Undergraduate Research Program in Combinatorics

This award partially supports two meetings of the Undergraduate Research Program in Combinatorics at the University of Minnesota Duluth. The first meeting will be held June 9 - August 1, 2024. In particular, the award supports two graduate assistants at the summer undergraduate research program during the 2024 and 2025 summer. These graduate assistants will assist the PI and co-director of the program. The graduate assistants will be engaged in all aspects of the program: finding suitable problems, acting as mentors and role models, interacting mathematically and socially with participants and visitors, holding practice sessions for presentations, arranging social activities, reading manuscripts, providing advice about graduate schools and fellowships, writing evaluations of the participants' research that the directors of the program use for letters of recommendation. They will likely continue their mentorship activities after the program is over: such as being a coauthor with participants on papers written after the summer program. The Undergraduate Research Program in Combinatorics will contribute to the advancement of combinatorics by resolving conjectures and answering questions in the literature of interest to well-established people in the field. New methods and concepts and novel applications and examples will be introduced. Some papers will provide deeper insights and better ways to think about concepts. The most significant impact the Duluth programs in 2024 and 2025 will have is the training of future generations of mathematicians who will foster undergraduate and graduate research when they become professionals. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.