Collaborative Research: Conference: Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference 2025-2027

This award is to support the next three meetings of the Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference (HRUMC), to be held in 2025, 2026, and 2027 during the spring. HRUMC is a regional undergraduate research conference in mathematics that has been held annually since 1994, bringing together about 300 undergraduates and faculty from colleges and universities in the northeast. The conference aims to inspire undergraduate students at all levels to see themselves as vital participants in a broad mathematical community and, hence, encourage them to persist in the mathematical sciences; to provide undergraduate students from a variety of institutions with an opportunity to learn more about the communities within the mathematical sciences, broadly defined, by interacting and networking with peers and faculty; to encourage undergraduates to engage in mathematical research at many levels by providing them with a professional venue in which to share their mathematical research and scholarship and to practice communicating it through formal talks; and to encourage students from underrepresented groups and women to participate in the mathematics and mathematics-adjacent communities. HRUMC offers a full day of research talks, an hour-long keynote address by a well-known mathematical scientist, professional development activities, and engaging discussions across a wide array of topics in mathematics, statistics, and data science. Most of the research talks are given by students, featuring work resulting from student theses, Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) projects, and/or other independent research. Faculty also give research talks pitched at a level that is accessible to advanced undergraduate math students. The talks are 15-minutes long, grouped into sessions which each have a uniting topic or theme, and which are then organized into parallel sessions over three blocks of time throughout the day. The fields covered are wide-ranging, historically including, but not limited to abstract algebra, analysis, data science, discrete math, graph theory, knot theory, linear algebra, mathematics education, mathematics history, number theory, statistics, and topology. The professional development activities focus on graduate study opportunities, career options, and community-building and community-expanding within mathematics. More information about the conference can be found at can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/hrumc. 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.